You’re being a bit of a nuisance. These Guatemalan girls are grinding corn on a machine that might rip their scalps off and you’re tripping on who pays for the video. Go start your own blog, produce your own segments and fund them however you want. If you have any comments about the content of the video, we’d love to hear them. Otherwise, put a sock in it.

Wow, that’s crazy!
I hope you get the chance to tell that depth-of-story along with all these segments. Really paints a vivid picture that adds greatly to the watching of the clip above.

Thanks for taking a moment to shine a little more light on the adoption situation in Guate beyond the passing and awkward reference in this great episode of BBtv.

Our family has a great love for Guate and her people. My wife recently returned from a medical mission in K’iche villages surrounding Mazatenango, and we have both spent time serving in orphanages in and around Guatemala City.

It is difficult to learn that Guatemalan families could adopt these children for free but do not because of the impenetrable caste system there — while there are families in the U.S. willingly paying tens of thousands of dollars to give these children a family, thus the opportunity for corruption and exploitation.

In some of the larger Catholic-run orphanages I served in, there is no attempt to find these children families because of the widespread belief you site in the episode — that white people adopt the children to steal their organs, As absurd as that sounds, it’s very real. And at 15 the kids can no longer legally be in the orphanges…

On the other side, private orphanages (there is no state run social services system in Guate — no state orphanages or foster care, only private or church run) have been decimated because the entire adoption infrastructure was shut down last year due to the comparatively few cases of corruption and the efforts of UNICEF. Both the US and Guate also became parties to the Hague treaty on Inter-country adoption and the new process has not yet been formalized or implemented in Guatemala. Which means, with no adoption fees coming in, the private orphanages are drastically downsizing or closing. And where do the orphans go?

The poverty Xeni describes is very real, and the opportunities for a better life are slow in coming. In a perfect world, these children would all have loving families who would raise them in their native culture — but as other commenters have pointed out, the Mayan people have suffered greatly at the hands of the government in Guate. Put them on a postcard to attract tourists, but then take their land and kill them. (Hmm… sounds vaguely familiar)

The difficulty with adoptions in Guatemala (and any other poor nation — for example, the hundreds of thousands of children orphaned by AIDS in Ethiopia) is the balance between those who are being exploited and the children who really do need families.

Sorry for the long and rambling post but the plight of orphans in Guate is a complicated thing, much deeper than a passing reference to the arguably-valid cultural fear of gringos kidnapping babies. There are loving families desperate to give a child a home, and there is the corruption of money and government.

For more, you could check out http://www.adaguatemala.org/, http://www.jcics.org/Guatemala, and http://www.guatadopt.com/

Just wanted to add my kudos on the video and the whole idea of the BBtv World.

News is old news. Unfiltered experiences of the world, through the world’s eyes, as it were — that’s what I believe is truly new.

Sometimes I really want to read what they said that was so wrong to invoke disenvowelment. After all, without knowing the crime, how am I supposed to avoid it?

That said, Microsoft has some good social programs.

p.s. i have a pet pig but he’s black and named pinky and not so little anymore!

Xeni, I hear ya.
Really I just hope you add the type of stories @ #22 in the comment threads of the rest of the vids. Coz it really helped set the context for this one, me having very little knowledge about that part of the world. It adds a nice dimension to the film, and breeds nice discussion to boot!

The corn-crushing machine is scary, especially its fan belt; but if they didn’t have it, the women and girls would spend a lot of time crouched over a stone metate, and everyone would have dental problems from the fine grit in their food.

It’s one of the constant problems of a corn-based culture. Dried corn is by far the hardest and toughest of the major grains, and it needs some heavy processing before it can be eaten.

Still, it would be nice if that machine had a metal casing.

Aloisius, JamesGyre, disemvowelled text is easier to read than you might imagine. Also, I know there’s a site that has a rudimentary re-emvowelling device, though I’m not sure where it is.

Xeno, please go read the moderation guidelines before you say anything further. You still have perfect freedom of speech on a website on your own. You just don’t have the liberty to behave like a complete jerk here.

maybe people would like to know that the U.S taxpayer helped fund the overthrow of their democratic government in 1954 and
helped train and fund the death squads that were responsible for tens of thousands of murders. The U.S, your international friend and helper.

Now wonder kids run away screaming…

ok, I’m done :)

Extraordinary work. I just wanted to say what an inspiration you and the BBtv crew have been to us here at SuperForest.

I run a sustainable living blog in NYC, and every time I see one of your videos, whether you’re playing a building with David Byrne or drifting weightless with Buzz Aldrin, or lovingly caressing the nose cone of White Night 2, all I can think is: God, I wish I was there.

The quality of your curiosity is unmatched.

Yours in admiration,

Jackson @ superforestnyc

I claim Put Up or Shut Up. That’s a radically different claim. Anyone who wants to do the leg work to figure out a different way to fund these would be embraced with open arms. Suggesting that Xeni should spend the time that she uses to make the films to track down funding options is just useless complaining.

Nobody wants to sow the wheat.
Nobody wants to harvest the wheat.
Nobody wants to grind the wheat.
Everybody wants to eat the bread.

(Except those of us who never touch carbs, of course.)

This is really awesome. Please, do more of this.

Until such time, would you rather pieces like this make it to air? Or not.

We’d rather air them and the dominating comments within this thread are the exemplification of exactly why- the dissemination of indigenous knowledge with the hopes of inspiring discourse and action.

We don’t allow sponsors to have ANY editorial oversight- which having been in the business a bit, I can promise you is a rarity. If you’d like to have a separate discussion on the merit of corporate sponsorship, I think that’s a very worthy topic. However, lets not detract attention from what really matters in this piece.

Ever grateful,

Derek Bledsoe
Segment Producer, BBtv