It's not the easiest situation but I do have a few contingency plans. At this point I do not know how long she will be under my care for so I'm trying to do the best with what I have.ផោមក្លិនស្អុយ wrote:Gav puts the pathetic into empathetic.gavinmac wrote:Well, this is a sweet deal for the parents. They avoid all the cost and inconvenience of raising the child but still get to see her regularly.Tacotuesday wrote: The mother is not a zombie and actually has a decent amount of responsibility, though she is a pretty mean person and i hate being around her voice is so grating, the dad is great and I speak with him every day. She sees them two times per month, them visiting us in PP at least once a month. They are really nice and they want their kid to get a good education but they realize that they are poor and they have known me for the past 3 years, as do all the workers at my job, my niece's school and everyone in the neighborhood.
Your situation is not that difficult. Hand the kid back to her parents and say "I'm happy to pay for her schooling, send me the bill."
Note: it has been suggested on this website that I have no empathy
But he’s right on the money here.
OP, you have created for yourself a
similar situation to the many orphanages in Cambodia. You are raising a hybrid child, one who won’t understand Khmer culture (is she learning to read/write Khmer or just English). The child will grow up to be one of those weird ‘foreign khmers’ I.e. she looks Khmer but doesn’t act it, is culturally foreign & can’t interact with Khmer people normally.
Parents have got a great deal.
You can’t adopt her, she isn’t an orphan - she has living parents & relatives here. If you take her across an international border you could be charged with trafficking.
International adoption for a Khmer child is nigh on impossible in a normal situation. Yours is far from normal.
You need to protect yourself too. What if you are called back to your home country urgently - you can’t take the child with you. It’ll (possibly) break your heart to leave her.
You should do as Gav suggests. Pay for education and take a step back.
As said above, if she is adopted it will not be by me, it will be by my Khmer Fiancee, so the process will be a lot easier to navigate.
Right now she is 6 so isn't able to support herself, I plan on re-evaluating the position when she is 10, then again when she is 12, etc. etc. Once she reaches an age where I think she can live in PP with her parents without it all inevitably turning into all giant clusterfuck, that is what i want, but at 6 she is not able to do that. I think theres a chance at 10 she will be able too, chances get higher as she gets older. That way I can pay the money directly to the school but have her be old enough to make some of her own decisions.
She's been studying in an international school for two years, I don't want to have given her an example of a nice comfortable and caring life for two years only to have that taken away. YES! I should have thought about that in the first place but I didn't and thats my mistake. I can't go back and fix the past but I can try to make positive decisions for the future. Her parents aren't responsible enough to keep her in PP (other relatives have tried, and it's failed massively, if you really want the details you can have them), if she lives in the province it's 20km from the nearest market and 4 km walk to school to a teacher who didnt finish high school, let alone speaks any english.
Yes, she speaks and writes both English Khmer, due to the on-going presence of my Fiancee and my neice's contact with her family every day I am not worried about her losing her language ability.
Thanks all for the suggestions.