The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (26 page)

Added to these incentives for corruption, Ethiopia’s legal system simply wasn’t up to the task of regulating the new influx of adoption cases. This has been the case in most countries where international adoption takes off, given that countries where parents can’t afford to care for their children are often also countries that can’t afford to run a comprehensive legal system. “My thesis is simple,” Maru said. “Adoption increases partly because you have an institutional framework that allows for the proliferation of agencies without any strict oversight.” By 2011 Ethiopia had accredited twenty-two US agencies to work in the country. But thanks to an “umbrella” process, in which agencies that had accreditation processed adoptions for those that did not, there were in fact more than seventy agencies in total performing Ethiopian adoptions.

It wasn’t just Ethiopia. From 2003 to 2010, a report from the African Child Policy Forum found, adoptions from Africa increased threefold; around 33,500 children were adopted from various African countries between 2004 and 2010. “Commercial interests have superseded altruism, turning children into commodities,” the ACPF wrote as they introduced their 2012 report, “Africa: The New Frontier for Intercountry Adoption.”

But Ethiopia became the chief country of interest, with twenty-two thousand of that 33,500 coming from Ethiopia alone. There were a lot of reasons for that, from Angelina Jolie’s high-profile 2005 adoption of her Ethiopian daughter, Zahara, to Melissa Fay Greene’s 2006 best-seller about the country,
There Is No Me Without You: One Woman’s Odyssey to Rescue Africa’s Children
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and the fact that in 2010 thousands of parents eager to adopt from Haiti were diverted to Ethiopia instead. Some attributed the popularity of the country in part to unacknowledged colorism, a
preference for lighter-skinned black children from a country that has sometimes held itself separate from the rest of Africa.

Adoption champion Senator Mary Landrieu had a simpler explanation, crowing to an audience at an Ethiopian orphanage in September 2010 that “people in America are falling in love with Ethiopian children. . . . They love them. It’s very simple. They think they’re beautiful and smart.” And with demand so high, even older children were recruited for export.

KATIE AND CALVIN BRADSHAW
had always wanted a large family, but after giving birth to their first two children, Katie suffered pregnancy complications. They were already an interracial family—Katie is white, Calvin is black—so they decided to look at Ethiopia, where adoption agencies said there were millions of orphans in need of homes. Because they had already raised their biological children from infancy and knew that children over five are less likely to be adopted, they said they were open to adopting older kids.

Michelle Gardner, acting as case manager for Christian World Adoption, returned with a referral for the Lemma girls, highlighting the fact that adoption fees at CWA are discounted for children over four and for adopting multiple children at once. The Bradshaws accepted the referral within twenty-four hours.

Katie was only twenty-six at the time, and although she had only parented children up to the age of three, adding an oldest daughter of seven—and not the thirteen that Tarikuwa really was—had seemed feasible. “I kept looking at the pictures thinking, you know, they look older. And so I would call Michelle Gardner and she would say, ‘Oh no, Katie, I’ve met them several times . . . and she can’t be older than nine.’ She said the pictures are deceiving, and she’s really a very, very small girl.”

Gardner wasn’t just any case manager. In addition to her adoption fundraising ministry, Kingdom Kids, she was one of the earliest leaders in the Christian adoption movement. In 2003 she had published her book,
Adoption as a Ministry, Adoption as a Blessin
g, in which she described how she and her husband, longtime missionaries in Taiwan, began adopting special-needs children from China, India, and Russia in the 1990s, using CWA’s services for at least one of the adoptions. She promoted adoption as “a ministry that has been largely overlooked by the body of Christ” and made early recommendations for ideas like church-based loans for adopting families. Like movement leaders who would come
later, Gardner warned that merely sponsoring a child living in poverty wouldn’t help his spiritual needs. “We have the opportunity to introduce children from other countries to the truth of the Gospel,” she wrote, and she described how she hoped her own internationally adopted children would return to their home countries as adults to evangelize.

Interestingly, Gardner’s book also predicted some of the pitfalls of the movement and warned parents not to approach the children they were adopting as though they were rescuing them. “No one, least of all a vulnerable child, wants to feel like he is being rescued.” But Gardner’s approach seems to have changed by the time she began working for CWA, and the video child-listings that Gardner created in Ethiopia were crafted to tug on parents’ heartstrings. In 2004 she adopted her first two children from Ethiopia, and then helped CWA become licensed to conduct adoptions from Ethiopia’s southern states. For two and a half years Gardner was the agency’s coordinator for older-child adoptions, during which time she interviewed children for the videos. “I think the Christian church kind of encourages this behavior that’s like a savior complex, and I think that this is one way of filling that—that need to be a savior,” said Katie today.

In mid-August 2006, half a year after getting the referral, Katie was scheduled to travel to Ethiopia to pick up the Lemma girls. She would be traveling at the same time as Michelle Gardner, who was adopting three more Ethiopian children herself. A week before the trip Katie went to Spokane, Washington, to participate in CWA’s mandatory older-child adoption training, conducted through Gardner’s Kingdom Kids. While she was there Gardner handed her paperwork stating a different cause of death for the girls’ mother, explaining she had died in childbirth, not from AIDS as they had originally been told.

The Bradshaws were confused. A month earlier she said they had been informed that the children were now legally their responsibility, and if they didn’t pick them up in Ethiopia, they would be liable for child support until the children turned eighteen. Katie and Calvin told themselves that the paperwork was mistaken—possibly a misprint, because so many other details, like the spellings of names, also kept changing. Katie went to Ethiopia, and a week later was standing with Michelle Gardner and Gardner’s husband in the lobby of the very Western Addis Ababa Hilton Hotel when a CWA agency worker brought her new daughters in. “I was in shock,” said Katie, “because they were so big. They were so much older than I was prepared for.” At thirteen, Tarikuwa was half Katie’s age—a child she barely could have given birth to herself. The girls seemed
uncomfortable but were polite and affectionate. They hugged her, called her mom, and told her they loved her—all things they had been told to do. “It was this very rehearsed exchange of pretend emotions,” said Katie.

Katie brought them upstairs to change into the new clothes that CWA had suggested she bring as a treat, and she was surprised that the girls, allegedly destitute, came with their own backpacks of extra shoes and outfits (which an agency worker told Katie to give to him). The girls, meanwhile, repeated one of the only words they knew in English, “Photos, photos” while pointing to the TV. Also in the backpacks was a photo album and a videocassette, showing the girls amid a crowded house of family and friends. “That’s when reality hit me,” said Katie. “They have this huge family. It had to be over a hundred people: godmothers, aunts. That’s when I realized that we had gotten scammed and that they weren’t orphans.” There had been earlier signs that all wasn’t right, Katie said, but this was the moment she began to realize she had, from the beginning, been a victim of what she’s come to call “faith manipulation.”

Katie went to Gardner’s room to ask what was going on, and she said Gardner responded by offering to “hold on to the photo album for me.” In shock, Katie handed it over. Later that night Katie went and got the album back and tried to figure out what to do—alone and young in a foreign city, with children she thought should go home to their family but whom she had been warned were now her legal charge. When she spoke to another CWA employee who said he was a friend of the girls’ father, Lemma Debissa, he became offended when Katie mentioned Debissa’s alleged HIV status, accusing her of slandering an honorable man.

Today, she believes she should have hired a driver to make the six-hour trip to Sodo to find Debissa and straighten things out. But at the time she was cowed by CWA’s and Gardner’s forceful warnings that such a meeting could cause problems for future adoptive parents and could traumatize the girls, who had already said their goodbyes.

When Bradshaw and the girls got to the United States, an Ethiopian friend of the family helped Katie and Calvin call Debissa to find out the truth. He emphatically denied he was HIV-positive and told the couple he had sent his girls to America to get an education. “That’s when we found out what this was. He was told that it was basically a foreign-exchange program. And he wasn’t sick. And we had just mortgaged our house and cashed out our IRAs to give his kids an education,” said Bradshaw. “I felt like such a fool. I had told everyone they’re HIV orphans. How was I going to explain that this wasn’t even a legitimate adoption?”

What was worse was the girls’ reaction to the news. Meya charged that CWA had “bought” them from their father. Tarikuwa exploded, saying she had been told she was coming to the United States for an education and demanded to be taken back home. When lawyers told the Bradshaws that that couldn’t be done, thirteen-year-old Tarikuwa—who, on top of everything, was enrolled in the fourth grade because her paperwork made her legally only nine—fell into a grief that didn’t recede. “Her meltdowns were so aggressive and powerful,” Katie recalls. “She was grieving so painfully and so deeply, we didn’t know if she was going to survive.”

The Bradshaws’ confrontation with CWA was almost as upsetting. When the Bradshaws told the agency that they thought the adoption should be canceled and the girls returned home to their Ethiopian family, CWA responded with surprising disregard. When Katie requested help from CWA’s postadoption support services when Tarikuwa was going through a crisis, she went days without hearing back from a counselor; when she finally did, she was told she needed to pray and give her burdens over to God. When Katie posted her complaints to a private web forum for CWA clients shortly after she returned from Ethiopia, warning other clients not to believe the stories they were told, she was kicked off for bad behavior and said the Gardners called to yell at her.

In October 2006 CWA’s Complaint Review Committee chairperson, Carol Nelson, responded to Katie with palpable condescension, writing, “Bottom line, you seem to be extremely unhappy and angry about the choices you made, and I honestly do not know how an apology can change that.”

Nelson continued disdainfully, “From your letter it clearly sounds as though you were hoping for children from dirt floor, straw-roof-hut and were angry to learn this was not the case at all. You state it is not the father’s fault. Please remember it is not your children’s fault that they do not fit the image you created for them in your mind.” She closed with a word of advice: “If you truly trust God and know that He led you to adopt, it is safe to believe He has a greater plan for you than what you currently can see.” In a brief letter the next month CWA’s founder and CFO Robert Harding told her that the case details didn’t support Katie’s complaints and wrote, “May God help you find peace.”

Katie’s continued calls to CWA were never returned. (CWA did not agree to my requests for an interview either and cited legal restrictions on their ability to discuss individual adoptions.) So in May 2007 Katie reported them to the Better Business Bureau of Western North Carolina, where CWA is based. In CWA’s response to the Bureau that month,
written by then-Assistant Executive Director Anita Thomas—now the agency’s CEO—the agency maintained that they had not intentionally been dishonest and that the age discrepancy was solely a product of Ethiopians not having any idea what their birthdays are, as “This information is not relevant to them as a society.” They further argued that they could not find any record of CWA telling the Bradshaws that Lemma Debissa was HIV-positive and dismissed her concerns that the family was intact by stating that the father’s Ethiopian salary of $58 per month was “well below any acceptable standard of living here in the U.S.”

Thomas concluded her letter to the Better Business Bureau with the notice that CWA was reporting the Bradshaws to their social worker and New Mexico’s child protective services, advising them to look into the safety of all the Bradshaws’ children, including their biological toddlers, “as we are concerned as to their well being as it is obvious there is no attachment on the part of Mrs. Bradshaw to her children.”

It wasn’t the first time that adoption agencies have responded to criticism by reporting complaining adoptive parents to CPS, but the Bradshaws were horrified, and Katie considered fleeing to Mexico with her biological children. “The night I got that in the mail was the most horrible moment of my life,” she said. “We tried to help some kids and in return I could have my children taken away.”

The Bradshaws’ social worker was understanding, said Katie, and explained to the CPS department that the family’s adoption agency was acting in retaliation. But the experience left the Bradshaws extremely anxious about how far the agency would go to protect their own side of the story. After
CBS News
began to investigate CWA and the Bradshaws’ story in 2010, the family received a suspicious letter from Lemma Debissa, denying that he had ever received money for the children and telling them, “[the] children are yours.” The letter was typed while all his previous letters had been handwritten, had unusually poor grammar, and even spelled his own name wrong. The Bradshaws and the girls all suspected that the letter was written by or under the influence of CWA associates in Sodo.