Amazing wonderful speakers.... WAY better than last year, very pertinent, insightful, an just plain awesome!
Lisa Marie Rollins who is a black adult adoptee and an amazing writer, actor, playwrite. She is in the final stages of developing a one woman show on her life story being a transracial adoptee. She did the play for us and is was so inspiring. She shared her story though her play, addressed racial issues, and faced adversity. Here is a link to her blog http://birthproject.wordpress.com
The other speaker was John Raible, a biracial adult adoptee and adoptive father. He has been featured on numerous TV shows etc throughout his life. He discussed racism issues, how to handle them, and most importantly what is important in raising a transracial adoptee. He discussed things like living in diverse areas, ensuring your child is not the only black child around, making sure there are black people in your life, ensuring you are giving them the skills that they will need to face racism alone etc. He was also the one who led us through the activity that I talked about before with the people sculpting exercise.... that was just amazing! Here is his blog as well http://johnraible.wordpress.com/
They both were just very honest and did not sugar coat anything. We need to be aware that when parenting black kids, there are things that we need to be very aware of, things that need to be addressed, things that we need to have in place in our lives, and things we need our children to know.
The biggest downfall to camp is the lack of black role models in the kids room but otherwise is a pretty good camp. We had a good time, there was a ton of stuff to keep us busy and we will definitely go again next year. One thing I realized is how lucky we are to have many other adoptive families who look like us in our circle of friends and in our community and that our community is fairly diverse (not diverse enough for my liking but much more diverse than most).
No comments:
Post a Comment