Madonna has spoken out for the first time about her current attempts to adopt one-year-old David Banda from Malawi. In an interview on the Oprah Winfrey show yesterday (25 October), the singer voiced her concern that the negative coverage would deter other people from adopting children in similar situations. "I feel like the media is doing a great disservice to all the orphans of Africa, period, not just Malawi, by turning it into such a negative thing," she told Winfrey, via a satellite link-up from London. She also claimed that the boy's father, Yohane Banda, had been "manipulated" into making misleading comments to the press: "I believe at this point in time, he's been terrorized by the media. They have asked him things, repeatedly, and they have put words in his mouth. They have spun a story that is completely false."
She also told of the first time she met David. "I'm financing a documentary about orphans in Malawi, so I was allowed to view footage and photographs of a lot of the children. An eight-year-old girl who is living with HIV was holding this child. I became transfixed by him. But I didn't yet know I was going to adopt him. I was just drawn to him.
"When I met him, he was extremely ill... He had severe pneumonia, and he could hardly breathe. I was in a state of panic, because I didn't want to leave him in the orphanage. We got permission to take him to a clinic to have a bronchial dilator put on him. He's still a little bit ill, not completely free of his pneumonia, but he's much better than he was when we found him.
"I think if everybody went there, they'd want to bring one of those children home with them and give them a better life."
Meanwhile, the boys father has now said he will not challenge the adoption - a change of opinion from last week, when Banda senior claimed that he didn’t realise that Madonna’s adoption would mean he would no longer have access to his son. "I don't want my child, who is already gone, to come back. I will be killing his future," he told Time magazine. The controversy continues…
11:28 AM | 26/10/2006
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