SPRINGDALE -- A Marshall Islander community organization has started a program to help kids who are put up for adoption stay with extended family members nearby rather than going to non-Marshallese families somewhere else.
Melisa Laelan, founder of the Arkansas Coalition of Marshallese, said a $28,000 grant from the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation will cover the program's costs for a year. The program began working with families earlier this month and has a goal of helping 50 in all, though Laelan expects to surpass that.
"We need to promote our culture and really preserve the idea of sharing your children within the family," she said, calling the adoption situation in the islander community a crisis. "I know this is what the community needs."
Adoption is a fraught and thorny topic among islanders in Northwest Arkansas, partly because of the gulf between the traditional Marshallese concept of adoption and the United States' legal definition. Laelan and others have said adoptions on the Pacific islands are, in a word, casual.
Aunts and uncles are basically seen as parents, cousins as siblings and nieces and nephews as children. Extended family members often step in to raise a child without any paperwork or a noticeable change in the child's life. The biological parents could live next door or even in the same house, and their connection to the child, especially the mother's, is considered unbreakable.
In the U.S., however, adoptions legally sever that connection, and biological parents can lose contact with their child.
Laelan and local circuit court judges for years have voiced concern over whether Marshallese mothers, who might not speak English well or at all, are being exploited or know what they're getting into by putting up their child for adoption.
On the other hand, other Marshallese women have been convicted of fraud in recent years for accepting money from multiple potential adoptive families at once or breaking other laws.
The specific number of Marshallese children put up for adoption is uncertain, but Benton and Washington counties lead the state in adoption cases, with more than 200 cases apiece each year, according to the Arkansas Administrative Office of the Courts. Laelan and the judges have said the majority of the cases are Marshallese.
The cultural difference can cause problems for the Marshallese relatives caring for others' children as well, because schooling, health care, benefits and other parts of American life require legal guardianship.
"And then the people don't have what you and I would think of as standard documentation," said Keith Morrison, a Fayetteville lawyer who is volunteering for the coalition program and has helped the group through the immigration clinic at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He said the grant covers $185 court e-filing fees for adoption forms and other expenses.
Julynn Hanchor has been raising her brother's son, Riten, since he was born four years ago. The mother stayed at Hanchor's house while she was pregnant, Hanchor said. She, Riten and Riten's mother, Yolanda Benjamin, were the first family to show up at the coalition's office for the program.
Riten was restless and rambunctious, exploring every corner of the office and calling Hanchor "mama." Benjamin said with a laugh that Riten sometimes calls her "auntie" or "grandma." He's the youngest of her three children, and Benjamin said she had no qualms about signing him over to Hanchor, who's unable to get pregnant.
"It's normal, because I really trust her like she's my own sister," Benjamin said, adding she'll see Riten every day and doesn't feel any differently about him than she does about her two older children.
Both Hanchor and Benjamin said they wouldn't be trying the adoption system without the coalition program and the knowledge of who's getting custody.
"I want somebody that's coming from my own family," Hanchor said, adding jokingly, "Why not? I'm getting old."
Coalition members fill out the necessary paperwork, then Morrison checks it over and takes it to a judge for approval. Morrison said the process for each family could take as little as two weeks if everything's in order. The program uses a type of adoption called relative adoption, which doesn't require a home study for close relatives and can save time and money, he said.
Washington County circuit judges John Threet and Doug Martin said they didn't know the full details of the program but supported the approach.
"Within the family would always be better, if that's a possibility," Threet said.
Metro on 08/27/2018