gemmaindia
Fantasy of sight, sound and movement
241 posts
Latest Posts by gemmaindia
Safwan Dahoul
I try, I try To make you cry And make you love me Oh, I would say yes Oh, I would say yes
My wait is you, my wait is you
My wait is you and I won't go on
Grimes - “Symphonia IX (My Wait Is U)”
The Artist Kousyuuya Paint a Dragon’s Body in One Masterful Stroke
Blog:Iromegane
“Dragons are considered to be similar to guardian angels. They are talismans against evil and bring good luck.
For ages they have adorn Shinto shrines and temples.Pictures of dragons are also believed to bring good luck, good fortune and family security.”
from the flyer at Kousyuuya
The artists at Kousyuuya only create dragon art, but as you can see, they do it very, very well. Every work is personalized and painted right in front of the customer, who chooses the design, color, and kanji of the characters.
Source: scarlettfu
Image courtesy of Kousyuuya. Found via DesignTaxi and JapanTravel
WATCH THE VIDEO:
Floating figures and dream worlds painted by Dorian Vallejo
Instagram or Facebook
Some people are born to become artists. American painter Dorian Vallejo is one of those people. Dorian started creating art when he was little, encouraged by his creative family. He sold his first commission at the age of 11 and attended the School of Visual Arts in New York when he grew older. Fascinated by many techniques Dorian explored all forms of art, now creating mostly paintings and drawings. Source:bleaq
I could live in the world just like a stranger I could tell you the truth or a lie I could tell you that people are good in the end But why, why would I? Angels will cry when it's raining Tears that are no longer clean What do you mean? What do you mean, so gone? I waited here so long
I couldn't leave you I think that you might think Now that you're missing something You won't leave the world with me
Watch my new music video for “Flesh Without Blood”/“Life In The Vivid Dream”: http://smarturl.it/FWBvideo Pre-order Art Angels now: http://smarturl.it/ArtAngels
Grimes // REALiTi
Si yo pudiera darte una cosa en la vida, me gustaría darte la capacidad de verte a ti mismo a través de mis ojos. Solo entonces te darás cuenta de lo especial que eres para mi
Frida Kahlo (via bohemioblog)
Today, an entire generation of internationally adopted Guatemalans live in the United States, Canada, Europe and beyond!
Some adoptees have made return journeys to Guatemala and some have not. We shouldn't be ashamed to discuss how we're processing or not processing our adoptions. Consider this the tip of the iceberg to a handful of families' stories, and an invitation to talk more about this.
Guatemala never forgets its children, and its children never forget Guatemala.
#Guatemala
#NextGenGuate
#Adoption
For many US adoptees from Guatemala, a complicated legacy
NEW YORK (AP) — Scattered across the United States are more than 29,000 young people born in Guatemala and adopted by U.S. families before that troubled Central American nation shut down international adoption in 2008 amid allegations of rampant corruption and baby-selling.
Today, as adoptees come of age, many want to know about their birth mother and why she gave them up and wonder about the murky circumstances of adoption. Some have traveled to Guatemala to investigate.
“Guatemala was all I could think about,” said Gemma Givens, a 25-year-old adoptee in California, who has made two trips to the country to learn what she could.
“I was just a mess,” she said, “the questions, the wondering, the pain, the desire to heal and to figure it out.”
International adoptions from Guatemala began to surge after a 36-year-civil war ended in 1996. Tens of thousands of civilians disappeared or were killed during the conflict, leaving legions of children without care. Orphanages overflowed, and American families seeking to adopt soon learned there was a vast supply of infants being made available.
By 2006, more than 4,000 Guatemalan children annually — about 1 of every 100 babies — were being adopted by American families, and the small country became the second-largest source of adoptees after China. Huge sums were at stake — American families routinely paid $30,000 or more to Guatemalan lawyers to arrange an adoption.
Then, as evidence of corruption mounted, the pipeline closed. Adoptions to the U.S. dropped to 27 last year.
Roughly half of all the adoptions by Americans entailed some type of impropriety — from outright abduction of infants by Guatemalan racketeers to baby-selling to various types of coercion and deception that induced mothers to relinquish their children, according to Carmen Monico of Elon University. The professor of human service studies has conducted extensive research on adoption in Guatemala.
Monico expressed empathy with adopting families, saying, “They had their hearts in the right place.” But she also has documented the experiences of Guatemalan mothers who believe their children were abducted to meet the demand.
“Some of these women have been searching for their children for years,” Monico said.
Uncertainty also has weighed heavily on adoptive parents.
“After we brought our son home, I became more and more concerned,” said Laura Hernon of Seattle, who with her husband adopted a boy from Guatemala in 2008, just before the shutdown. She wondered, “Is there a mom who was duped out of her baby?”
The couple investigated, and determined anew that the adoption was legitimate.
“What would we have done if otherwise? I have no idea,” Hernon said.
A couple in Littleton, Colorado, Linda and Tom Chatfield, commissioned a search for the birth mother of their son, Michael, six years after they adopted him from a Guatemalan foster family in 2005. He was “asking a lot about where he came from.”
The searcher tracked down not only the birth mother but also his birth father and five siblings. Two years ago, when Michael was 8, the Chatfields took him to Guatemala to meet the impoverished family.
“The meeting was very emotional,” Linda Chatfield said. “They told Michael they loved him, and they asked him to forgive them. That’s a tough thing to ask an 8-year-old.”
The Chatfields haven’t returned to Guatemala since then. But each summer they attend a camp in Colorado for families with children adopted from Guatemala and other Latin American countries.
Kathi Thomas, an adoptive mother in Austin, helped found a similar camp four years ago in cooperation with the University of Texas School of Social Work. Camp programs emphasize Guatemalan and Mayan culture, encompassing dance, music, martial arts, cooking and language classes.
“They get soaked in Guatemala,” Thomas said. “When they come out, they are so proud of where they come from.”
Thomas’ daughter, Lettie, attended the camp and was a junior counselor this summer. Now 14, Lettie was adopted as an infant. An earlier adoption attempt by Thomas and her husband, Mark Hastings, unraveled when a DNA test revealed that the purported birth mother was a fraud.
In Lettie’s case, Thomas and Hastings told her about her background and took her to Guatemala at age 4 to meet her birth mother. She had eight other children before Lettie was born and felt she couldn’t afford to raise another.
“She said she wanted our daughter to have opportunities that her other children can’t even dream about,” Thomas said. “She said she had prayed for Lettie every day, and hoped Lettie didn’t hate her for sending her away.”
On the contrary, Lettie said, “I’m thankful that she knows that I’m having a safer life here… Yet I am always missing her.”
Another adoptee, 16-year-old Jake Niergarth of Cedar, Michigan, said he has relished visiting Guatemala with his parents and helping people — they’ve built houses, and his father has run dental clinics — yet he expressed no regrets over not growing up there.
“I probably would be working in a cornfield somewhere making almost nothing … living in a one-room shack with no electricity or running water,” he emailed. “My life would be completely different.”
When they adopted Jake through a major U.S. adoption agency in 1999, the Niergarths learned the birth mother’s name, but little else about her or why she relinquished Jake.
“It’s hard to think about,” said Lisa Niergarth, though adding they and the agency did everything legally. “We would never ever want to take a child away from a mom, but if there was a birth mother who felt she couldn’t take care of a child, we wanted to be there and do what we can to live up to what that mom would have wanted for her child.”
As for Jake, a high school football player who aspires to join the U.S. military, he’s content to leave questions about his background unanswered.
“I don’t want to take a risk and find out something that I don’t want to know,” he wrote. “I just want to go on thinking good things about my birthmother, like her giving me a better home and life, and nothing more.”
While most of the Guatemalan adoptees have yet to finish high school, hundreds of others are older and living on their own.
Gemma Givens, the 25-year-old Californian, started a Facebook-based group called Next Generation Guatemala three years ago, hoping it would help adoptees connect.
Many are reticent, said Givens, suggesting one reason is that many Guatemalan adoptees know little about their birth mothers and are uncertain whether their adoptions were legal.
“That’s everybody’s first question when they join this community: How do I find my mother?” Givens said.
Her own search took her to Guatemala, where she sought out the lawyer who handled her adoption, and she now thinks she knows the basic story: Her birth mother was an illiterate indigenous woman who worked as a housekeeper, was impregnated by her employer, and decided to relinquish the baby.
“It hurt to not know where I came from, so the logical answer was to go figure it out,” Givens said. “I’m ready to start my life now.”
There’s been no equivalent sense of closure for Adam Joseph, 27, who was adopted by a Portland, Oregon, couple in 1988.
“The thought of who’s my birth family — it’s always been with me,” said Joseph, and he has a photo of his birth mother and a birth certificate with her name. Still, he’s not yet sure he’s “emotionally ready” to launch a vigorous search.
Today, he works for a Portland-based nonprofit that assists some of the unaccompanied minors — many of them Guatemalan — who recently crossed the U.S. border without legal status as they fled poverty and violence. “It’s my way of giving back,” he said.
And what of the orphans of Guatemala since the curtailment of international adoptions?
Hollen Frazier, president of the agency All God’s Children International, which placed about 420 Guatemalan children with U.S. families between 1999 and 2008, supports Guatemala’s efforts to reform its adoption system. But she says a total shutdown of adoptions to the U.S. was unwise given the limited progress that Guatemala has made with its new priority of promoting domestic adoptions.
“It’s so devastating to walk into orphanage after orphanage, and see that there’s no organization trying to find families for children,” she said.
Bethany Christian Services, which was among the U.S. adoption agencies most active in Guatemala, has remained engaged there, working on programs to keep fragile families together and improve foster care.
“While it was probably good that adoption stopped, because of the unethical practices, it raised the question of what’s going to happen with the vulnerable children,” said Brian DeVos, a senior vice president of Bethany. “There are some good orphanages, but also a number that are just warehousing children.”
It remains unclear if and when full-scale international adoptions from Guatemala might resume. DeVos says he’d like to see some of the young people adopted by U.S. families become advocates for such a step.
From Michigan, the Niergarth family will head back to Guatemala next June, when Jake — for a high school project — will work with two classmates to build homes for impoverished widows. He’s looking forward to it, and so is his adoptive mother, though with a mix of emotions.
“When I am down there and see these children, my heart just breaks as I know that they have very little opportunity in life,” said Lisa Niergarth. Jake has much more, and yet she said, “He lost his tie to his culture in exchange for that opportunity, but we are hoping that we are giving him at least a little of that culture back.”
___
Follow David Crary on Twitter at http://twitter.com/CraryAP
Zhivago: You lay life on a table and cut out all the tumors of injustice. Marvelous.
Gen. Yevgraf Zhivago: I told him if he felt like that he should join the party.
Zhivago: Ah, but cutting out the tumors of injustice, that's a deep operation. Someone must keep life alive while you do it, by living. Isn't that right?
Scout Finch all grown up
You're Not Ready to Adopt a Guatemalan child if:
An adoptee run support network for fellow Guatemalan adoptees wherever they find themselves in this...
Next Generation Guatemala is an adoptee run support network for fellow Guatemalan adoptees wherever they find themselves in this incredible 'out of the mainstream' experience.
La Chateau des Pyrenees-Rene Magritte 1959
oil on canvas
IIsreal Museum, Jerusalem, Israel
“Everything has been transformed by the narcotráfico,” says O’Laughlin, who has often traveled to Huehuetenango, where most of Florida’s Maya residents are from. “The entire fabric of life has been destroyed.” YUUUPPPP ...Mendez, herself a Guatemalan-born Maya, concedes that integrating Maya newcomers can be a challenge as well. As indigenous people, for example, they’re not always accepted as part of mainstream Latino culture. And that points to another big obstacle.... I wish that integrating Mayan people into mainstream Latino culture wasn't a goal. Indigenous Guatemala is it's own category and culture.
La Montaña Sagrada - The Holy Mountain
“Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious.” ― Rumi
International Indigenous Peoples Day!
La Organización de las Naciones Unidas (ONU), decretó el 9 de agosto como el Día Internacional de los Pueblos indígenas. Este sábado 9 de agosto se celebra el Día Internacional de los Pueblos indígenas, fecha propicia para rendir honores a miles de hombres y mujeres defensores de sus derechos, costumbres y tradiciones. Hace unos 20 años la Organización de las Naciones Unidas (ONU), decretó el 9 de agosto como el Día Internacional de los Pueblos indígenas. Este 9 de agosto se celebra el Día Internacional de los Pueblos indígenas, fecha propicia para rendir honores a miles de hombres y mujeres defensores de sus derechos, costumbres y tradiciones.
This Saturday, August 9th is celebrated the international day of people indigenous, propitious date to render honors to thousands of men and women defenders of their rights, customs and traditions. Hace some 20 years of the United Nations Organization (UN), enacted on 9 August as the international day of indigenous peoples. This August 9th is celebrated the international day of people indigenous, propitious date to render honors to thousands of men and women defenders of their rights, customs and traditions. #DiaInternacionaldelosPueblosIndigenas www.tvmaya.org.gt
If there were two movies to get out of Music in Film Class, it was Doctor Zhivago (4:31) and Mahler
Even if people were steppin all over my family (rude)...couldn't deny how gorgeous these were