Before getting to any other news today, I'd like to ask everyone to pop over to Lisa's Guatemalan Adoption Blog for some excellent information on how you can participate in advocating for the children of Guatemala.

There is a real and present danger that thousands will be condemned to legal and permanent limbo in the very near future, and those trying to avert this disaster could use more support.

Check out Lisa's post, please, add your voice to those scrambling to keep this hash of a mess from destroying many lives, and send Lisa's blog out to everyone you can think of who might be willing to step up, as well.

Following the story from Czech I wrote about the other day on a DNA test proving that a child's paternity was as impossible as its maternity, the latest is that the family that ended up with their child has been identified and a swap is to happen before the end of the year.

Yikes. What a range of conflicting emotions this scenario must present.

I can only hope that the families are able to keep close contact.

Custody issues can be even more complicated when children at the center of them are Native American, as this story illustrates.

The ICWA [Indian Child Welfare Act] makes it more difficult for courts to remove children from a dysfunctional Native American home than from one of any other race or ethnicity. Government agencies, for example, must prove that "active efforts" -- rather than the more typical "reasonable efforts" -- were made to rehabilitate drug-addled or psychologically impaired Indian parents before taking away their children. If an agency is unable to help the parents, the law strongly urges a search for Native American guardians.

In the case featured in the article, the father of the children at risk in not Native American, and the kids have been placed with his sister -- their auntie -- also not Native American. Although this is a kinship placement in every sense, because of the ethnicity of the aunt custody rights are questioned.

Why is it so rarely about the good of the kids?

And I'm hoping it's rumor mill stuff and not fact that Madonna's second adoption is in doubt because the child-in-question's birth uncle is insisting he does not want her to be adopted by a white person.

He tells British newspaper The People, he says: "We were told when Mercy went into the orphanage that we would be in constant contact with her and that she would come back to us after six years. I would like to stick to that. Whether it be Madonna or any other white person, I'm against our child being taken away."

Six years? How much is "constant contact"? What if it was Beyoncé instead of Madonna?

If the uncle was stepping up to raise the child now rather than sentence her to at least 6 years of institutional life, or if it was Madonna he was objecting to, I'd be okay with it; after all, kinship placements can be good, and anyone is within their rights to dislike any one person ... especially Madonna ... but to leave a kid in an orphanage because of blatant racism? How can that be right?

He adds: "I would rather we be poor and struggling with Mercy, than for her to go and live with a big white star far away."

But he's not struggling with Mercy ... she's living in an orphanage, and although I do know that there are many in the world who figure that any child is better off in their birth country, no matter what, I disagree.

As a happy person in a family where none now reside in the country we were born in, I see the world as a more cohesive place where we can all belong anywhere.