My Life With a Cartoon Character

She is three years old. She is a force of nature. Yesterday we celebrated a special day that not all children do; the anniversary of her adoption.

As anyone who has lived with a three year old knows, it is like living with a cartoon character. Wild exclamations erupt out of nowhere, "Look, it's the cat!!!" Odd things fascinate, such as the evermore-disintegrated body of a small mouse that got mushed on our street. Every time we walked out the door for a week she asked me, "Wanna see a dead mouse?"

She surprises me, such as with her sudden decision last week that we should run the full length of the long street that stretches downhill from our house. She demands piggyback rides, "Dad, carry me on your head." She careens verbally back and forth between English and Spanish. "Que quieres buy?" she asks me when we play store. She cracks up at my jokes and stories, especially the daily one I tell about Emma the trouble-making cat, in the bus on our way to day care each morning.

Three years ago when she first came to live with us she was one of 37 babies living in 35 cribs in a Cochabamba orphanage. By baby standards she wasn't very energetic and she still couldn't do a lot of the things and eight month old should be able to.

Two weeks later it was as if someone had flicked on a light switch hidden on her back. He eyes seemed to double in size. It is just about the simplest and oldest truth around. Children, from babies on up, need a family. They need one or more big people around who think that they are just the best thing ever and who give them the kind of love that even the best institution can't.

For four years I helped run an orphanage here and was deeply connected to it for more than a decade. I've watched a lot of kids.

And readers – here's the story. There are thousands of orphaned children growing up in institutions in Bolivia, many, many for their entire childhood and youth. I think they should be adopted and I think they can be, by great Bolivian families, if the Bolivian government would make that a priority.

Here is what the government could do:

1. Authorize a full national survey of orphanage institutions in Bolivia, to figure out exactly how many children live in them and how many of them are potentially adoptable because they have no family connections of any kind.

2. Organize a force of social workers to carry out the investigations required to give the kids who have no one the papers they need to be declared "legally abandoned." This is an important safeguard to be sure that there isn't some missing mom or uncle out there who will come looking for the child later and it a legal prerequisite to the letting the child be adopted.

3. Evo Morales could then go on national TV and announce a country-wide adoption campaign, "My fellow Bolivians, we have 2,000 children in our country that have no family and are living in institutions. Are there 2,000 good Bolivian families who can come forward and give these children homes?"

Why not? Do the entire childhoods of thousands of boys and girls qualify as a national priority? Aren't all children entitled to be some parent's beloved cartoon character?

So many problems, in Bolivia and elsewhere, seem insurmountable at times. This one isn't. Bolivia could do this.