Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, August 29, 1994                   TAG: 9408300049
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

RWANDA SAYS NO TO ADOPTIONS

The 41-year-old Seattle paralegal had never before considered adoption. But she's one of hundreds of Americans who have asked aid agencies in recent weeks about adopting young Rwandans.

Their prospects are slim.

The new Rwandan government prohibits foreign adoptions. Moreover, major relief agencies discourage them unless efforts to reunite families fail after two years. But adoption advocates say that long a wait is too hard on the young.

The quandary raises a sensitive question: What's worse for a child, to lose cultural identity or languish in homeless poverty?

``Sometime you have to do more than just write a check,'' Seeley said, explaining why she and her husband, who have two teen-agers, want to adopt a Rwandan child. ``When we sat there with our 2.2 kids in the suburbs of Seattle and saw these pictures of kids, it was so overwhelming and frustrating.''

Amid Rwanda's overwhelming nightmare of murder, dislocation and disease, the children's stories are particularly wrenching: infants slashed by machete blows that killed their parents, sick babies rolled in mats and left to die along roadsides, a toddler tugging at the sleeve of his dying mother.

By early August, up to 200,000 Rwandan children were estimated to be orphaned, abandoned or separated from families, said the new government and UNICEF.

Aid workers have already registered more than 3,000 children in a central database in Nairobi, Kenya, through interviews with the young or their traveling companions. UNICEF estimates 130,000 of the lost children will either find relatives or be taken in by people in their home villages and neighborhoods.

But the major aid agencies stress that tracing is difficult and time-consuming, and they urge that adoption be held in reserve as a last resort. The agencies avoid calling the children ``orphans,'' noting that in the chaos of war and exodus no one can assume the young have lost their parents.

Many in the aid agencies believe traumatized children heal best in their homelands.

While the agencies cannot dictate the rules on foreign adoptions, they exert great influence when they have a government's ear. The new government in Rwanda has made clear it disapproves of foreign adoptions, at least for now.

For a child, however, two years is too long, some adoption advocates say. And some researchers say that parenting is a more important factor than children's separation from their homelands.

``For younger kids, two years can be a lifetime, developmentally, mentally,'' said William Pierce, president of the National Council for Adoption in Washington, D.C.