"In safe hands"
Ramaloo Mudavat, a
Lambada tribesman, holds his one month-old baby boy Soona on the floor of the
Primary Health Center in Ballanagar Village as his wife Kumaly recovers from
sterilization surgery. Kumaly and Ramaloo decided to have the surgery after
having their second child, Soona, a girl. Kumaly already had a boy and her
mother advised her to stop after two. Such a small family is very unusual in
Lambada tribes but government agencies and other outreach groups are trying
to educate Lambada women about having manageable sized families and avoiding
some of the problems that have led to the selling of babies in these
communities.
The collapse of the overseas adoption system
in Andrah Pradesh, India has left scores of orphans stranded in institutions,
still two years after mass closures of the private homes. Aggressive
opposition to foreign adoptions has lead to fewer opportunities for
abandoned, homeless, and street children to make it into the orphanage
system, now entirely state-run. Private aid organizations have had to
shoulder much of the burden. Opposition groups claim that foreign adoptions
create such a high demand for babies that poor tribal families are selling
their children and opportunistic middlemen are cashing in. Meanwhile,
conditions are so harsh for tribes like the Lambada that they continue to
find ways of reducing the burden of large families. Many women in these
tribal areas have turned to mass sterilization camps offered by the
government out of sheer desperation.
