written: 2/28/05
published: ABC News.com

Transracial Adoptions Evoke Heartfelt Responses
Work on Emotional Topic Brings Personal Stories From Others
Commentary by HARI SREENIVASAN

Mar. 2, 2005 - There are certain moments when sharing pieces of information can elicit much more than a response and, for me, telling people that I was working on a piece about transracial adoptions was a series of such moments.

One co-worker told me about the challenges and internal struggles she and her family went through when deciding to adopt. Another said he was adopted and told me about his personal journey in finding out about his birth parents and the impact it has had on the relationships with the parents who have raised him. These aren't the type of conversations that flow freely in newsrooms.

When some of my friends heard I was working on this piece, their curiosity was piqued by the race factor. The topic quickly started a debate about the state of racism in the United States vs. other countries, and the cultural identity dilemmas that transracial adoptees could face. These conversations are ones that members of the adoption community are still having, some quietly, some loudly.

Our piece focused on a few of the elements that enable transracial adoptions in the United States and examined the situation of black babies from the United States being adopted in countries like Canada or Germany.

Transracial adoption basically means parents of one race or ethnicity adopting children of another race or ethnicity.

My producer, Nils Kongshaug, and I visited a white family in Canada who had just successfully adopted Ethan, a beautiful, bouncing baby boy in every sense of the phrase. We sat down with Phil Bertelsen, an African-American filmmaker who had grown up an adopted child in a white family, and talked about the unanswered questions that forced him to make a film about the subject.

Contributing to the story were representatives from adoption link , an agency in Chicago that specializes in placing black children into adopted families, and Bridge Communications, a firm that helps prepare prospective parents for the transracial adoption process.

There are several different factors that have created the reality of black children being placed overseas with white families and, in no particular order, they are: The dearth of black families in the United States in line to adopt; the fears adoptive parents of other races have that they won't be able to bear the challenges of raising a black child; ignorance or racism; wishes of the birth mothers that their children be raised in a less-prejudiced society than the United States; and the demand created by overseas parents who are looking to adopt and find a supply of black babies in the United States.

Watching Bertelsen's film, "Outside Looking In," is a good primer to the layers of complexity involved in these adoptions. On the one hand, there is the idealism of loving, prospective parents for whom race truly might not matter when they adopt a child. On the other hand, there is also something to be said for giving children a sense of their own cultural heritage and preparing them for a world where race is still an issue.

In 1972, the National Association of Black Social Workers called the idea of placing black babies into white families "cultural genocide." Though it hasn't made pronouncements as strongly since, the group still thinks it's a good idea to keep black children with black families. A recent law made it a crime to consider race as a factor when it comes to adoption and that's one of the reasons children of all races in the United States are available to prospective parents of all races.
There are several great online resources if you want to learn more about transracial adoption. They include:
Adoption.com: http://transracial.adoption.com/
AdoptiveFamilies.com: http://www.adoptivefamilies.com/transracial-adoption.php
About.com on race relations: http://racerelations.about.com/cs/raceandadoption/
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Administration for Children & Families: http://naic.acf.hhs.gov/pubs/f_trans.cfm
Statement from NABSW on transracial adoptions: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~adoption/archive/NabswTRA.htm
About.com on NABSW's statement: http://racerelations.about.com/library/weekly/aa121700a.htm
Interracial Voice: http://www.webcom.com/~intvoice/point19.html
African American Adoptions Online: http://www.africanamericanadoptionsonline.com/

Copyright © 2005 ABC News Internet Ventures

written: 2/9/05
published: ABC News.com

Reporter's Notebook: Dubai, Part 2
Focusing on Profits Amid a Delicate Balance of Ethnicities and Cultures
By HARI SREENIVASAN

Feb. 9, 2005 - On any street in Dubai, you're likely to find men in long flowing dishdashes speaking on one of the latest GSM phones and getting into a Porsche Cayenne turbo, a BMW 7 Series or a more exotic car like a Ferrari or Lamborghini.

The streets aren't paved with gold here and these men aren't oil barons (less than 6 percent of Dubai's money comes from oil), but they are the wheelers and dealers of this boomtown. Whether you're wearing the traditional dishdash or an Italian suit, bring your money and leave your politics behind -- it's a simple idea that has created quite a unique society.

This is a country where the ruler, Crown Prince Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, drives himself around in a boxy white Mercedes SUV with just one bodyguard. He is said to jot down license plate numbers of people who are violating traffic laws and have their licenses yanked when he returns to his modest palace. He races in endurance horse rides and can be seen wandering downstairs to the Starbucks at his office building. Compared with the recent inauguration of President Bush, this sort of access to the leader of a country seems unimaginable. An ordinary Emirati can approach the sheik, unusual even for the Middle East.
The vision and plan for Dubai that the sheik has laid out and the projects that are already under way are just half the story. The way the people click with the systems in place is just as interesting.

Watch one of the latest channels on the airwaves in Dubai -- a fashion and lifestyle channel called INtv -- with shows ranging from clothes and cars to events and trends -- and you realize that Dubai is anything but a sleepy little Arab nation steeped in conservative religio-political ideology. Its conservative neighbors, including the other emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates, seem to turn a blind eye toward this young upstart because so many of the most interesting non-oil-based investment opportunities are centered at this emirate.

Watch INtv and you might learn how to tell a lot about the man in the dishdash across from you. For example, an Omani wears a different type of head wrap than a Kuwaiti, and an Emirati models his facial hair differently from a Saudi. Superficial distinctions aside, Dubai has become quite the salad bowl for people from the Middle East and beyond.

More than 85 percent of Dubai's population is from somewhere else. You'll bump into very few true Emiratis. When you actually do, you'll notice that they did their schooling overseas at American or European universities and have come back to lead their country. You'll find women as well as men in positions of power, as entrepreneurs running start-ups in the free-trade zones as well as in other segments of society. You'll find Europeans of all sorts escaping the chills of their homelands on the beach resorts. You'll find Lebanese, Syrians, Libyans, Saudis, Kuwaitis -- and then there are the Asians.

It's a reality that smacked me in the face rather quickly: most of the blue-collar work in Dubai is done by South Asians. I am of South Asian descent myself, so perhaps this is what someone from Mexico feels like when they go on holiday to the southwestern United States. In Dubai, Indians and Pakistanis work construction jobs night and day. For all the building that is going on, the bulk of the sweat equity is from the backs of my people.

They live in labor camps and work under conditions that have at times been exploitative -- a reality recently gaining traction in the local press. They drive the taxis and mop the floors of hotels. Joining them in the hospitality industry and behind the counters of drug stores are East Asians and Southeast Asians and Africans. I'm sure there are examples of these minorities moving upward in Dubai as well (I met a few of them), but the number of foreign minorities doing menial work is visible from the moment you set foot here.

This sort of racial hierarchy occurs in a city that prides itself on offering the best the world has to offer. The Burj Al Arab hotel is an example of what can easily be considered the opposite end of the spectrum, and of how architecture can become iconic to a city. The world's largest dedicated all-suite hotel boasts 202 suites wrapped around a triangular atrium so tall that the Statue of Liberty could fit inside it. The entire hotel is shaped like a sail and the entire shore-facing side is made of two layers of Teflon to keep the heat out and the cool in. The royal suite here will set you back more than $10,000 a night, and several times in the past year, the hotel says, they've been at 100 percent occupancy.

Tourism is one of the anchors of Dubai's success. The city is planning on expanding its population and tourist visitors by three times in just the next five years. Land development projects fly off drawing boards to boardrooms and onto the streets with an unparalleled speed.

The city has also launched ambitious plans in the health care and education sectors, not just to train its own population but because of the unmet demand of its neighbors in the United Arab Emirates and the rest of the Arab world. A fact of life for most people from the Middle East is that regardless of how wealthy they are, if they want their kids to go to an American university or take their parents to the best medical clinics in the world (which are often in the United States) it has become much harder since 9/11.The same goes for getting jobs in the United States, or even getting tourist visas for shopping and entertainment.

Dubai is trying to bring the best of the West to the Middle East. It is creating a place where the resources of Harvard Medical School and the Mayo Clinic are a short drive from jobs at Microsoft and Dell, which are close to malls featuring Prada and Cartier.

This isn't pure capitalism. Let's not forget that this is still a dictatorship, benevolent to the entrepreneur perhaps, but malevolent in certain interpretations of women's and workers' rights as chronicled by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. While the possibility is greater here than in most places in the world that if you have a good idea, you'll be able to act on it, Dubai is still such a small society that it is absolutely necessary to be connected with the right people.

For example, we Americans generally take it for granted that the proceedings of the Supreme Court are open to the public. But in Dubai, major grievances between men (it's mostly men who are in the conversations) are settled behind closed doors in the high court.

Walking down through one of the myriad malls during the shopping festival (a monthlong event where essentially every major store in Dubai has a sale), you'll notice Muslim women covered head to toe in traditional abayas and you'll also find women who look like they just stepped out of an MTV hip hop video. Every Emirati knows that such a liberal attitude wouldn't fly outside Dubai's city limits -- not in conservative Sharjah, for instance, the next city up the coast.

So why doesn't Dubai have a big target on its back for attacks by radical Islamic groups? One theory is that Islamist groups see Dubai's freewheeling economy as an opportunity for money-laundering. The U.S. investigation into the 9/11 attacks found money trails leading to the United Arab Emirates. Dubai is working with the world economic community to target and turn over questionable funds, but identifying the shade of gray that's paying for the new concrete being poured all over this town is tough to do. Another theory is that perhaps the best thing Dubai has going for it is its lack of history. There seems to be a void: Dubai imports the best Italian restaurants and the best American hotels and the best European stores -- without highlighting much of its own history. What you start to realize is that history, especially in this part of the world, can come with a lot of expensive baggage -- mainly politics. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is front and center in most of the Middle East. Foreign policy toward any third country is measured by how and whether they take a stand on this strife. In Dubai, the focus is on profit, not politics.

It's this fragile balance of ethnicities and cultures and religions glued together by potential that seems to keep the lights on at this desert oasis. Hopefully it will be a beacon of hope for the region, not just another mirage.

Copyright © 2005 ABC News Internet Ventures

written: 2/8/05
published: ABC News.com

Reporter's Notebook: Dubai
Build It and They Will Come: Boomtown United Arab Emirates

By HARI SREENIVASAN

Feb. 8, 2005 - For many Americans, the only time they run into the words United Arab Emirates is during an online transaction when it appears just above United States in the drop-down country menu. But once you visit Dubai -- the shiniest and newest sliver of this tiny Middle Eastern country -- you'll realize rather quickly that it will be a city and a country we will all soon become familiar with in one way or another.

You can see it as you begin nearing Dubai in the air -- either from the downward-pointing cameras that Air Emirates allows its passengers to sneak peeks from or the old-fashioned windows. From the minute you set foot on the tarmac, it becomes clear that the skeletal objects you saw dotting the landscape are massive cranes for construction. The entire city is growing -- in every direction, from condominium and apartment high-rises to hotels to beach villas to planned communities on manmade islands so big they are visible with the naked eye from space.
Dubai's airport features raffle tickets for Ferraris, Porsches, Harley-Davidson motorcycles and bars of gold, along with an enormous mall of duty-free shops that employs more than 1,100 people and generates more than $300 million in revenue a year. It's the first indication you have that you are walking into some sort of combination of Disneyland (disclaimer: Disney is the parent company of ABC News) and Las Vegas (without the casinos) -- to an exponential degree.
Dubai is a tiny coastal city along the Gulf. I hesitate to say Persian Gulf because there is some dispute in these parts whether it should be called the Persian Gulf or the Arabian Gulf.

Before you think that the bread and butter for this town is oil, think again. The United Arab Emirates' capital city, Abu Dhabi, has the oil. Dubai knows that its fields will dry up in less than 20 years, so it has launched perhaps the most ambitious plan ever to try and make its sand worth something. As of now, less than 6 percent of Dubai's economic success comes from oil. Dubai is planning -- in the space of five years -- to triple the number of people visiting it to 15 million, and increase the number of people living in it to 3 million.

Come One, Come All

One of the ways that this trading town along a creek has reformulated itself into a megalopolis is by throwing everything and the kitchen sink as incentives for companies to invest in and relocate to Dubai. There are free-trade zones where 100 percent foreign ownership is allowed, with no individual or corporate taxes or import/export duties whatsoever. The zones come in the shape of large office parks with unimaginative names like Internet City, Healthcare City, Media City and Knowledge Village, but inside the clusters of companies it's anything but dull.
More than 22,000 knowledge workers are now in these free-trade zones, earning moderate to high wages and spending that money back outside the office park. This is the tradeoff that the government here is banking on -- that an educated and trained population makes up for the lack of tax revenue from these employers.

When you drive around Internet City, you'll see familiar names like Cisco, Oracle, Microsoft, Dell, HP and IBM. A block or two away in Media City, you'll see Reuters, the Associated Press, CNBC and Showtime, along with al-Arabiya and al-Jazeera. In Healthcare City and Knowledge Village, Harvard Medical School is set to open its first operation outside the greater Boston area. These businesses are doors apart, with food courts and artificial lakes in between them -- where employees from competitors and partners all congregate.

The idea of industrial or technology parks is nothing new, but few around the world offer concierge-like services that take care of every piece of paper that needs to be filed, with a single Dubai government office for all contact and approvals-- creating a situation where all you have to do is show up and plug in.

A side note worth mentioning is that inside the free-trade zones there is unfettered access to the Internet -- meaning no proxies and no censorship. In the city at large, the Internet comes with a few snags: certain words and sites are blocked by the government unless you have a special workaround. When I asked the officials inside the free-trade zone how they manage to minimize the amount of "objectionable" content that may flow through in an Arab country, they respond with a smile and say: "it is not in our tenant's self-interest."

The tenants inside these free-trade zones are charged by the amount of Internet traffic they use, meaning if their employees start downloading bootleg MP3s or Paris Hilton videos, the employer has a financial -- more than moral -- interest in shutting the behavior down. This is illustrative of how Dubai often deals with prickly moral and culturally sensitive issues in a neighborhood of conservative Arab nations. More often than not, it creates market disincentives rather than reminders of the heavy-handed laws.

Think Big, Bigger, Biggest

Over the top doesn't begin to give you an idea of the competitive nature of this place. When you're standing near the world's biggest flagpole, you wonder what the world's tallest building will do to the ever-changing skyline. Construction on the building -- whose final height is still a closely guarded secret -- is scheduled to begin in a couple of years.

I visited a ski slope under construction called Ski Dubai. Yes -- a ski slope, and yes -- in Dubai. The complex's completely enclosed slope will feature a black diamond run (as well as beginner terrain) and a half-pipe for the 1,500 skiers and snowboarders an hour expected to use it. After riding the world's first curved chairlift up the hill -- it curves to the left as you ride up -- they will ski down the quarter-mile slope in a descent that will take the average skier a minute or two. And then they'll do it again. Ski Dubai will be part of the Mall of the Emirates, scheduled to open in September 2005. With more than 400 stores, it will be the largest mall outside of North America.

Ski Dubai's traffic might cool off a little when a huge new project called Dubailand opens -- complete with its own ski facility. Dubailand, a project as large as two Singapore-sized islands, promises to have the biggest mall in the world -- complete with a Jurassic Park-like robotic dinosaur section. The sheer size of Dubailand -- and its intentions to be the No. 1 family and leisure destination -- starts to become apparent when you look at the models in the lobby of its offices. There are hotels shaped like sand dunes, an aviation museum full of aircraft, a world-class racetrack and, of course, an enormous theme park.

Field of Dreams

The most dramatic example of Dubai's vision is a land reclamation and development project called The Palms. What do you do when you have a beautiful strip of ocean and not enough beach? Well, Dubai decided to build more beach in the shape of massive palm trees. Each massive "tree" will house residential properties along every frond, and hotels and apartment towers along the trunk. The first of three has already been dredged and built -- and is already big enough to see from space with the naked eye.

If you think this is a crazy idea, there are at least a few thousand investors who disagree. Developers of The Palms say that the 2,000 residential properties on Palm One sold out in three days. These are homes that won't be ready for another year. Palm Two is said to be sold out and some homes on that island have already gone up 25 percent in value.

Developers here are unabashed in their efforts to lure prospective buyers. For example, a five-star dive facility is expected to be built along the edge of the first palm -- when I asked the saleswoman why anyone would want to dive in waters that perhaps didn't have much fish in them -- she said "they might want to dive to look for the one-kilo bar of gold we'll be dropping into different parts of the dive area EVERY DAY." While Palms One, Two and Three are under way, there is already a fourth project that boggles the mind. Further out to sea, Dubai has decided to re-create a map of the world with 300 tiny manmade islands -- islands that anyone can buy. The cheapest will cost a little more than US$4 million and the most expensive will be $36 million. Seventy of the 300 islands are already spoken for. One investor bought the 12 islands that make up Australia and Papua New Guinea. When you buy an island, it's up to you to present a plan in six months as to what type of house you plan to build on it, how you plan to get there and back, and so on. It's your island but there are still guidelines -- this is of course a product of Dubai, part of the United Arab Emirates.

There are even more projects in the works, but the point is that the impossible seems to take less time here. It reminds you of the optimism and entrepreneurialism of the dot-com boom, where every idea was funded. Here in Dubai, however, it's brick and mortar that's being hoisted by cranes. If there is a bust, the weight of the fall will be much worse than anything we've ever seen in the United States.

Copyright © 2005 ABC News Internet Ventures