No I didn’t go anywhere!  And everything’s fine!

Aside from a couple days of rain the last few days, springtime in Korea is the best.  So comfortable and flowers everywhere.  I wish it was like this all year…

Sorry I’ve been AWOL.  Actually I have a couple mundane posts in the drafts bin but actually my mind has been whirling as I continue processing the past month and the past two and a quarter years here in Korea.

Really, I’ve just been incredibly busy.  Doing what?  Well, aside from the Korean class (which I seriously doubt if I’ll be able to keep motivated for) and some socializing after that (which IS motivating) with other classmates who are even less motivated than me (because it goes way too fast), I’ve started a website for one day when I’ll be an artist, set up a blog in conjunction with that website tracking my process towards that goal (no you can’t see it yet!), saved the photoblog of A Collection of One, also accessible from that website, done research for and by this weekend I will have set up a forum for the Adopted-Abused.com website, as a few of the members there have started talking amongst themselves and would like a place to start a community, begun research on drafting an adoptee-driven recommendation for implementation of the Hague Convention on International Adoption to submit to the Korean government and set up a wiki space for our Korean Adoptees for Fair Records Access Facebook group to collectively write that white paper.

The latter activity has really been ENERGIZING!  After sending out a mass message to members to show their support for the group to thwart being shut down by Facebook for lack of activity, instead of just support there has been an amazing wave of impassioned testimony and discussion.  I think everyone there also feels like we’re emerging as an actual community, and it comes at the perfect time to address the way in which records access will be handled, since Korea has officially voted to adopt the convention but have yet to determine how to implement the convention and turn it into law.  Next in the works will be a website for people’s testimonies.  Well, it’s on my list…

It’s really great because this is a single-issue that is (relatively) simple (compared to the rest of the adoption issues) which affects happy adoptees, angry adoptees, and all the shades of adoptee in between.  This isn’t about blaming Korea or telling Koreans how they should be, think, feel or about shaming them or blaming them historically – this is about the violations of our civil rights through the withholding of our own identity documentation and is something happening NOW because of the privatization of our vital records.  Even adoptive parents question the ethics of this.  And you know that protecting our civil rights also protects new generations of Koreans if we do it right.

So this is an amazing thing we can do – together – if we can make recommendations (we ARE the first and oldest subjects of this mass social experiment, after all) that insures to our satisfaction that records are totally divested of control by those with a conflict of interest and that third party oversight includes us.

I have absolutely NO IDEA about all this stuff, only a vague background.  But there’s a lot of other good people here who do.  But I can take my grass roots rabble rousing passion and try and get us mobilized.

What a great new year.  I’ve somehow managed to vanquish most of my demons, embraced a long term goal/original calling and now have a purpose to my remaining time here in Korea – and it’s a positive do-able thing that galvanizes us adoptees to come together.

Yayy!