Arrested & Fraud Charges Laid

So I said in my Confession Friday post that I was going to blog about this subject yesterday but then the day turned out to be sunny & warm and I thought, why waste a perfectly good day, a day long awaited on this subject.  Don't get me wrong, this subject is very important but I just really needed a day of warm sunshine to give me a little mental tidy and clear out some of the grumpies I've been feeling lately because of the LONG winter and the lengthy visa wait and I refused to let those people take one more thing from me.  I guess it was my way of flipping them the bird.  Today my husband is in a volleyball tournament and his alarm went off at 6:30am.  Since he hit snooze, we have one of our friends staying here and our dogs are like bulls in a china shop when it's breakfast time, I am wide awake at 7am on a Sunday.  Since I'm awake and it's looking a little gloomy it seems like the perfect time to make a cup of tea and blog about what I think.

I got the news Friday via an internet group I'm part of that an arrest had been made and fraud charges laid against the people who used our adoption funds for personal use and led to the bankruptcy of our adoption agency in July of 2009.  I knew these charges were pending, obviously the investigation has been going on since 2009 and I had heard rumours lately about this being wrapped up and that I/we should be watching the papers.  However, when I heard the news, I didn't have the reaction I expected to have.  Or even the one I wanted to have.  I saw the subject of the email and the link to the newspaper article and started to cry.  I have no illusions about the pain from 2009 being healed and thinking I had moved on.  It's still a big lumpy mess under the scab that's starting to form, but I didn't expect all those feelings to come rushing back at me like a Mack truck.  I thought I would be happy & cheer that finally the people who caused so much pain would have to face it.  Instead I feel the sadness, the anxiety, the anger.  I am one of hundreds of people that were affected by July 2009 and I carry the weight of that each day.  I have met and befriended some of these people and heard their stories and know how they were affected.  People who were matched with children lost them because paperwork was not signed and those children went back to their birth families and died because they weren't being fed.  Children in the transition home were getting one bottle or one meal a day depending on their age for months prior to the bankruptcy despite about $70,000 apparently being sent over for food for the kids.  Staff in Ethiopia had not been paid for months and were using their own funds to feed the kids because they were afraid that if they said something these children would end up back on the streets.  Some of those staff members couldn't find jobs for months after the bankruptcy because no other agency wanted them working their or have the stigma of what happened associated in any way with their own agency.  Families here at home lost the child they had hoped & dreamed of for years and while some lucky few, myself included have been able to move forward with their adoptions or adopt elsewhere or even get pregnant, many families have not.  Marriages broke up because it just couldn't take the strain & stress of one more setback or disappointment and this one was a doozy.  There were businesses that were owed money as well.  The ripple affect of what those people did goes far and wide and very deep.  I would love to be able to raise a glass and toast to them finally having to face all of the people they hurt.  I would really like to know that there would be some restitution but I worry that in the end nothing but a slap on the wrist will occur.  I truly & deeply hope I am wrong.  My parents were involved in a business years ago where one of the partners stole a lot of money and had many more fraud charges laid then what has been laid against the couple who ran Imagine and this man never got anything more then a slap of the hand.  I hope that because this involves people, families, children that perhaps the courts will take a harsher stance.  I wonder if they even feel like they did anything wrong.  To this day there has not been an apology.  I guess apologizing would be admitting you did something wrong.  I find that over the past few months when the subject of the bankruptcy came up I would leave the room.  I just don't want to hear about it anymore.  I lived through it and have the battle scars to prove it.  I suffered from anxiety after the bankruptcy and still have attacks every now and then.  I had to take a month of stress leave because it was just too much.  I will give a victim impact statement and I will attend the court proceedings and I will hope that that something is done to give the families a sense of closure.  I don't think anything will ever take the pain away from what happened but hopefully this will give people some closure and allow healing to start.  I totally understand why people are happy and that they did raise a glass in toasting the arrest of these people.  If that gives them peace and helps to heal some of the wounds they have suffered, I say drink up friend, let me pour you the next glass.  For me, my healing will come by focusing on the future.  Our future includes a beautiful little boy, who would not be part of our family had it not been for the bankruptcy.  I will never say I'm glad the bankruptcy happened, but I can't be entirely sorry for it either now, because the bankruptcy was just another part of the broken road that led us to Addis.