My 10-Year Battle to Adopt in Guatemala
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 19 January 2018
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 2007 Guatemala overhauled its much-criticised adoption system. All future foreign adoptions were immediately suspended, while some 3,000 cases already underway were caught in legal limbo. Many of these cases have taken years to resolve. American Ruth Sheehan tells Mike Lanchin about her long struggle to secure the adoption of Luis, a young Guatemalan child she first met ten years ago.
(Photo: Ruth Sheehan with Luis in Guatemala City, courtesy of Ruth Sheehan)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
| 0:06.8 | searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the |
| 0:11.8 | telly we share what we've been watching |
| 0:14.0 | Cladie Aide. |
| 0:16.0 | Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
| 0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
| 0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less |
| 0:24.9 | searching and a lot more watching listen on BBC sounds hello and welcome to |
| 0:30.7 | the witness podcast history told by the people who were there. |
| 0:34.3 | I'm Mike Lanchin and today I'm taking you back to January of 2008 |
| 0:39.2 | when Guatemala suspended all foreign adoptions while it sought to clean up its notoriously chaotic |
| 0:45.6 | and corrupt adoption system. I've been hearing from one American woman who got |
| 0:50.8 | caught up in Guatemala's adoption Tangle. |
| 0:54.0 | I always have wanted children and a family. |
| 1:00.0 | I always imagined that I would have that and it just didn't happen over the years. |
| 1:05.0 | Ruth Sheum is a single woman from Dallas, Texas, |
| 1:10.0 | who set her heart on offering a warm and loving home to an adopted child. |
| 1:15.0 | In early 2007 she began the process of adopting a baby from the Central American Republic of Guatemala. |
| 1:22.0 | His name is Luis. When Ruth first |
| 1:25.0 | saw his picture on the website of an American agency specializing in Guatemalan |
| 1:30.0 | adoptions, he was barely two months old. I've looked at hundreds of |
| 1:33.8 | referral pictures by that time literally and something about his picture |
... |
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