Sitting here today I can’t help but think of the future of Guatemalan adoptions. What will be happening one year from now?

At this point, most of us involved in Guatemalan adoptions are tremendously relieved that adoptions in process will be grandfathered. Fear that they wouldn’t kept many people awake at night, but Guatemala obviously came under pressure from the US and is going to do the right thing and let those adoptions being completed.

However I cannot help but feel helpless and a bit hopeless about the future. A new Central Authority will be in charge of adoptions. This new Central Authority, comprised of one representative from the Supreme Court, one from Social Welfare, and one from the Foreign Affairs Ministry was given sixty days to write up new adoption regulations. No doubt they will follow the guidelines of the Adoption Law, but I can’t imagine something of such magnitude being completed in sixty days. The representatives chosen will not have been involved in the adoption process until now, so they will be learning everything from the beginning. After all, Guatemala is creating a new system. I’m going to speculate that these representatives know next to nothing about adoption.

With more government involvement while lawyers and notaries are sidelined, I see chaos written on the wall. I’m not going to shout endless praises about lawyers, but there were good ones in Guatemala and they got the job done. When was the last time you used the words “efficient” and “government” in the same sentence? This coupled with the fact that there are strong anti-adoption sentiments in the congress makes the future of adoptions look questionable.

The new adoption law has made no new provisions for the children who don’t get adopted. There is no money being put forward to build more orphanages or fund any of the existing ones. Children who were being adopted in the past, were put in caring foster homes or resided in orphanages. The new law makes no provision for foster families, most orphanages are overcrowded now and receive no funding from the government, so I wonder who will be taking care of these children? Will sixty days be enough time for the new Central Authority to find a solution for these children, or are they just hoping that the need for adoption will disappear? It won’t.

I have so many unanswered questions that I can’t get answers to, and more frightening, I don’t think the Guatemalan government has answers yet. What will happen to the children who need homes, and where will they be this time next year?