Posted on 02/06/2006 8:59:18 AM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
The spectacle of a hapless little boy staring through the heavy mesh of a cage launched mega-successful author of the Harry Potter books, J.K. Rowling, on a crusade to end the caging of Eastern European tots.
Referring to a 2004 story in Britain’s Sunday Times about little Vasek Knotek imprisoned in a Prague hospital, Rowling wrote in today’s Times, "If you read the piece and it’s as bad as the picture, then you’ve got to do something about it.”
The story hit her hard, she wrote, especially since she has a horror of what she sees as "one unendurable terror - incarceration in a very small space.”
"I tore out the article, frightened of losing it even though it was the most disturbing thing I had ever read,” she explained. "The following day I photocopied the page 50 times and started writing letters.”
Doing something about it has not been easy the Times noted, explaining that Rowling has had to combine her work for numerous other charitable causes and her roles as mother and author. It meant she had to stop breastfeeding her third child slightly early when she traveled to Bucharest last month to launch a charity, the "Children’s High Level Group,” which will campaign for improved rights for children.
Among its goals, she wrote is putting a stop to the "widespread cultural acceptance, even encouragement, of abandonment in the cases of children with mental and physical handicaps.” Noting that the Romanian government has put a moratorium on adoptions by foreign parents despite pressure from the West, she wrote that it is "an issue around which tempers flare like grenades.”
She writes movingly of "exceptional” children and teenagers she met who had experienced Romania’s child care system, describing how she found one abandoned baby lying listlessly in a hospital.
"I tickled her cheek with a finger; she continued to look ahead. But then as I was about to move away she looked round and gave a sudden smile.” Rowling writes that she so choked up that she felt she had a "hard-boiled egg in her throat”.
Conditions for children in Romania, says Rowling, have improved hugely since the fall of the communist regime in 1989. But she writes: "There is still much work to do there — more than 30,000 children remain in care.”
Oh stop whining. Not everything is about the USA.
I can see Dame Judi Dench in the part.
Oh yeah!! Even BETTER than Dame Judi. Imelda has the right eyes and facial structure!
Eewww! She'd make a perfect Umbridge!
You too?? :)
Why do you assume she's blaming America. In the article she said nothing about America; only that we need to help those chidren. Do you have a problem with that?
LOL!
That would've fit the image I have of Umbridge perfectly! :o)
I won't hold that against her.
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