Poet Lemn Sissay on growing up in the care system, racism and finding his Ethiopian family 

He doesn’t need the butcher of Ethiopians But he still call support dictator and Genocider Abiy Ahmed Ali. With all crimes against the people of Ethiopia are committed.

BLACKS MUSLIMS INDIA ARE THE BIGGEST RACIST IN THE WORLD THEY ARE DESTROYING THE UK

Same

Ethiopians are hypocritical for the peace and they live in hateful their own country

That is what happens without centralised adoption. There is no ability for the system to self regulate if it is a disordered anarchy of uncooperative providers. All nations need far more centralised adoption, with a strong agency that has authority, powers, resources and suborganisations to control and progress orphan care. This system is centuries out of date.

@@asekuvenaIs there another name for centralised adoption? I’ve tried googling to learn more (super interested as a public policy student & would like to learn more!) but couldn’t find any resources 😢 Would be VERY grateful for any advice/further clarification! Many Thanks 💗

Having a national agency responsible for dealing with adoption. This improves efficiency, as measures are much easier to enforce like: • Regulation to make sure the local adoption centres and organisation are being efficient and improving child welfare • Standardisation, to make adopting easier • Coordination. So children can be adopted far from where they are and can be easily moved. Resources can also be moved this way • Specialisation. For example building a very big facility for housing orphans. Or a big facility to educate them. • Procurement. It is easier to buy things for orphans if you buy in bulk and can invest more in supplier relations. • Research. It is easier to figure out what is happening with regards to orphans and orphanages if there is a national agency. It is also easier to research how to make the system better. • Promotion of adoption and behaviours that optimise around it. It is easier to advertise adoption services to potential people if resources if done at a national scale. It is also easier to campaign 🪧🪧🪧 to raise awareness of how to make adoption a smooth and effective process. • Having orphans be *officially* the children of the state or the national adoption agency. This is good for morale as it makes them seem less orphan-y. Plus, it makes the state able to easily do the paperwork for what a human parent usually does. • Connecting orphans with organisations. Mostly so it is easier to get them in vocational training and volunteering to improve their human resources and life prospects. I said centralised, because technically private and NGOs could do it, as well as the government. India 🪷 has a weak one in the form of CARA. Mostly because it aligns with Indian core values of national unity and institutional development. Though, every nation's adoption services are pretty decentralised. A lot of the time adoption agencies just run by themselves and the state is only involved last minute, when doing the documents to make the parentage official. The agencies do not tend to work with each other and if they did it would be a headache, because there is no central authority to make the process run smoothly. Centralised adoption means every adoption organisation is the subject of the national adoption agency and has to follow their regulations. This can be low level authority, where it is mostly for paperwork and standardisation, or high level authority where the local organisation's major decisions are all done by the national adoption agency. Adoption is something that has needed reform for centuries. The current system is antiqued 🧓 and causes a lot of unnecessary harm from inefficiency. @@juji5427

More than just being respectful. If you read the Quran, it’s actually there the fact Ethiopia ( Abyssinia) back then gave Mohammed’s followers refugee and saving them from getting prosecuted in Saudi I believe. Bear in mind, the king at the time was not even Muslim. Fast forward, today the so called muslim Saudis are mistreating and deporting Ethiopian citizens.

no one would've helped her in Ethiopia because they dont have much and have their own kids. That is why she was in the UK, most likely to make money and send it to her family.

Was sent to care home because it was a policy of the day by the uk gov.

In Lemn’s autobiography “My Name is Why”, there is a reproduction of a letter from his mother, Yemarshet Sissay, written in 1968 to Wigan social services, asking how she can get her son back, to live in Ethiopia. She had initially gone to the UK to study and found that she was already pregnant when she arrived. She was persuaded to place her baby into foster care while she completed her studies - she was led to believe that this would be a temporary arrangement, but the social worker changed his name to Norman and placed him with the Greenwood family on the understanding that they would be able to adopt him long-term. Yemarshet then had to return to Ethiopia unexpectedly, because her father was dying. The Wigan authority did nothing about her request to have her son returned, though they did keep the letter on file, which Lemn finally found many years later. Lemn’s father was a pilot for Ethiopian Airlines and he used to fly Emperor Haile Selassie around, but he died in a plane crash in 1972. Lemn’s mother and he were not together, and after Lemn finally found her (she was working for the UN in The Gambia at the time) it took her many years to reveal his father’s name.

@@tml_moana6378 He said people there (Ethiopia) would have helped her. I wonder why she didn't travel to Ethiopia to give birth. Foster care should always be the last choice, sending a child to be with their relatives is always better. His father could have provided some financial support to raise him with his relatives. It is emotionally wrenching for a child to be placed with complete strangers, and then to be moved to other strangers. Sometimes, in the case of deceased parents, there is no choice, but a career is not worth this pain for a child. I'm shocked that the UK foster care system would promise to take a child for a few years and agree to return the child. I think they will do this only when the parents are incarcerated. Although I have heard of cases where adoptive parents believe children are orphans, only to find out later the parents are alive and are expecting the child to return to them after the child has grown and completed their education. The adoptive parents have been deceived, too.

@@cherylk.2474 Such cases are shocking, and I absolutely agree with you that placing a child in the care of the State should always be the last choice. It's important to remember that what happened with Lemn Sissay happened 57 years ago, when attitudes in the UK towards unmarried mothers were very different from today. Another thing to remember is that this was pre-IVF, and back then couples who couldn't have children of their own but wanted a family had no option but to adopt, so the babies of unmarried mothers were sometimes seen as a commodity to fill this demand. That doesn't make it right, but it's what happened. I don't know why Lemn's mother didn't return to Ethiopia to have the baby, but I imagine it may have had something to do with the fact that she had saved money and got a visa to study in the UK (no small thing), and perhaps she thought that if she left, she wouldn't easily be able to return. The fostering was probably presented to her as the best short-term solution - the baby would be well cared-for while she completed her studies. She was only in her early 20s, at most, and living in a culture she wasn't used to. I'm sure she had no idea of what would happen. As far as the father supporting the baby is concerned, I think that was unlikely, given that she described him in her letter to Wigan Social Services as 'the cruelest person in the world', though she did say that for the child's sake, she needed to make an arrangement with this man: "Lemn needs someone to take care of him. He needs to be in his country, with his own colour, with his own people. I don't want him to face discrimination." The Children's Officer replied to her letter by saying that they were very surprised to hear that she was back in Ethiopia, and that "he [the baby] is in very good hands at the present time, and is with excellent Christian folk who are doing very well for him." They refused to give her the name and address of the family. There is a file note in 1974, six years later, saying that the Greenwoods considered Norman (Lemn) as their child and would like to adopt him but feared that "investigations may lead to his mother," so they were totally protecting their own interests. Yemarshet Sissay had to flee Ethiopia at the time of the Civil War, which broke out there in 1974, She is, I believe, still alive and living in New York, and Lemn appears to have a good relationship with her. The reasons behind her actions in 1967 are personal to her and I guess the world at large may never know.

The government shares legal parental responsibility with the parent of the child is in care currently.

That is not the same things as being the legal parent of the child. That is a watered down version of the rights and responsibilities human parents get 😠. @@ashoahmed7391

yes he does , and he is a victim because of it

Keep going kiddo. @@shamusshamus6251

why would he not mention that?