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has added a new journalFor a handful of Haiti's many orphans, not only brought release from a week of fear and misery following the earthquake on 16 January 2010. But it also ended 3 years of waiting for a better life with couples' attempts to adopt them finally bore fruit.
Some Amercian families have spent years trying to adopt some of the estimated 380,000 orphans already living in Haiti.
Source
~ 109 Haitian orphans are being adopted by Dutch families www.newser.com
~ 80 Haitian orphans are to arrive in Miami www.fresnobee.com
~ www.orlandosentinel.com
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has added a new journalArticle excerpted from islamonline's website
www.readingislam.com
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has added a new journalAbdul Sattar Edhi provides charity and solace for the poor and displaced of a dangerously unstable, religion-pummeled country.
The 280 Edhi emergency centers scattered across Pakistan, in virtually every city and town, offer a place of last resort to people whose families cannot care for them or who have fallen through the cracks. Beggars on the street, children born with birth defects, and the mentally ill are all welcome for treatment and eventual settlement in a larger facility free of charge. The centers provide social services to women who are victims of abuse and rehabilitation for drug addicts.
Edhi's fleet of 1,200 ambulances can be called on a toll free number nationwide by anyone needing care. These ambulances also patrol the streets of Karachi and other big cities looking for dead bodies, which are then shrouded and given a proper burial.
Edhi says some 12,000 people are cared for in the 17 large Edhi homes nationwide. Most of the hundreds of emergency centers the foundation maintains also have jhoolas - baby cradles that take in unwanted babies. Controversial when it started many years ago, the Edhi jhoola service is now Pakistan's leading adoption agency and is seen as responsible for a drop in the infanticide rate. Started by Bilquis Edhi, it has placed some 80,000 babies with new families.
Careful not to offend sensibilities, babies are offered for adoption only to Pakistanis living here or abroad, and the center will allow Christian or Hindu families to adopt a child only if it can be proved that the baby's birth mother was of those religions.
In a country as poor as Pakistan, where about one fourth of the population of 160 million lives on less than a dollar a day and more than half are still illiterate, there are obvious political questions that arise from Edhi's work.
A living Legend ? an example of devotion ? an inspiration ? an institution - these are some of the indicators of a Pioneer called Abdul Sattar Edhi.
www.contactpakistan.com