Day One

"Well we are changing planes in Houston. We arrived at Newark Airport this morning at 4:30 and are a little tired. One of the thoughts and concerns about the research project is that somebody had mentioned that the orphans in the adoption pipeline may have been grand-fathered into the adoption process and that many pundits are not as concerned or anxious or fearful that the tsunami of unwanted babies will occur. Part of me wonders if there may be a certain amount of business as usual, in other words, the 15 babies a day being exported to the US may be continuing and the transition to government supervision may be more of a soft transition or not the hard stop that we had been led to believe. That still begs the larger question, is there essentially a baby manufacturing component to the Guatemalan economy and my inexperience, my lack of experience in this area, makes me realize that I do not know or do not understand what the implications of that are, so those are my thoughts and will try to frame the research accordingly.