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School's out for Eid
The battle over school closure for religious holidays heats up as Muslims and Hindus demand equal time off for their children.
By Michael Kress
[09/21/99]

The Borrowers
They're not looking for a lifetime commitment. They're just looking for a kid to come out and play with them.
By Eve Pell
[09/20/99]

Eric: Hold your breath, 1946
An excerpt from "Why She Left Us."
By Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
[09/17/99]

Why they never told us
First novelist Rahna Reiko Rizzuto talks about the silence surrounding the Japanese internment camps, being "stealth Japanese" and writing herself into two children.
By Kate Moses
[09/16/99]

The things we carry
You have 30 minutes and two garbage bags: How do you pack for a disaster?
By Cynthia Gorney
[09/16/99]

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The little boy's bio reads like a personals ad but functions more like the prelude to an arranged marriage, since Dustin himself was not involved in its composition. Dustin is one of 1,400 foster children currently listed online in FACES of Adoption, a database maintained by the National Adoption Center (NAC) in Philadelphia and Children Awaiting Parents in Rochester, N.Y. Thirty-seven states run their own "photolisting" sites as well, and the federal government will soon be taking bids for a comprehensive national site. The Clinton administration has pledged to double the number of adoptions out of foster care by 2002 and has proclaimed the Internet central to its strategy.

Photographs left to right, top to bottom from FACES of Adoption: Cesar Chris Damien Devin Dion Jeammessa Jesus Justin Karen Katie Marialies Mark Mark Michael Mikel Shakeem Sharice Tara Tiffany William

Exploring the FACES database is an unsettling experience, one that forces even a casual visitor to examine, however briefly, her own prejudices and capacities. The search engine allows you to enter criteria such as race, gender and age, and to indicate, on various numeric scales, the level of physical, mental and emotional disability you feel you can accommodate. A search for the most desirable adoptees -- healthy white children, or infants of any race -- will yield zero to very few. As you move up the disability scales, photographs of children begin to download by the dozens or hundreds.

The descriptions of each child -- submitted by social workers across the nation, who generally list only those "hard-to-place" children for whom they have been unable to find local homes -- are hyperlinked to definitions of their various deficits and disorders. Once prospective parents e-mail their interest in a particular child, the NAC staff puts them in touch with local social services departments, which take the process from there. The NAC has facilitated 114 adoptions, most of them interstate, since it launched the Web site in 1995. The first, and farthest, was from Pennsylvania to Alaska.

Susan Marshall came across the Web address in an adoption magazine a few years ago. Now she's hooked. She uses the Internet regularly -- she's studying for a master's degree in teaching through an online program -- and checks in at FACES every time she logs on. Susan, 38, and her husband, Jeffrey, 36, already have nine adopted children of various ages, races and levels of disability. (Jeffrey also has one biological daughter.)

The Web wasn't around when the Marshalls started adopting children. It has, however, made it a little harder to stop. A bulletin board in the couple's bedroom is papered with ink-jet images from the FACES Web site: Duane, Tanesha, Molier, Christina, Tanka, Nykkole, Latisha, Octavia, Angelica. "If I had my way," says Susan, "I'd have every one off that Internet and adopted."

Turning onto the long dirt driveway that leads to the Marshalls' home in north central Pennsylvania, past the wooden sign in the shape of a pig that bears the names of each of their children, it's tempting to imagine a scenario out of "60 Minutes": A saintly country couple tending to their personal rainbow of damaged and abandoned children. But the Marshalls, who built this two-story modular house on family land after their trailer home was destroyed in a fire last year, aren't like that.

Jeffrey, a school custodian, is no Cliff Huxtable and doesn't aspire to be. When an older boy threatened to jump out the window a few years back, Jeffrey says he dared him, "Go ahead." ("You forgot to mention the window of the double-wide was 3 feet off the ground," chides Susan.) The Marshalls both have Native American ancestry -- Iroquois on Jeffrey's side and Sioux on Susan's -- and like to think that their home replicates the gathering of tribes out of which the Sioux Nation was formed. When a neighbor called his wife a "nigger lover," Jeffrey came across him later in town and slammed the man's arm in the door of his truck. (That part was an accident, Susan interjects.) Jeffrey says he relates to his children not because he's so good but because he grew up bad -- poaching, brawling and some other things he won't specify because he never got caught for them -- and he knows what it's like to be an angry kid.

This is how their son James -- a sandy-haired, serious boy of 15 with an extravagant spray of freckles -- describes what it means to be a Marshall: "There's nothing better than having a set of parents that really love you and want to take care of you the rest of your life. Like, if something is wrong with your car and you need help, you can call your dad. But if you're out there by yourself, who are you gonna call?"

Before coming to the Marshalls' home, James and his older brother, Vic, spent their toddler years moving from one foster home to another. It was confusing, James recalls -- he'd get up in the middle of the night and head for what he thought was the bathroom, only to find himself staring into a closet. His memories of those early homes are mainly of emptiness. "One time my foster parents were watching 'Wheel of Fortune' and I lost my tooth. They said, 'Go throw it in the garbage.' I said, 'What about the tooth fairy?' They said, 'OK, put it underneath your pillow.' When I woke up, there was a dollar under the pillow, but the tooth wasn't gone."

Next page | "You can't push children on people, but how about just telling them?"