The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (27 page)

After the 2009 airing of the Australian exposé
Fly Away Children
showed Michelle Gardner recruiting children near Kembata, CWA attempted to distance themselves from her, claiming she was not a CWA employee. However, Gardner herself said she was in a public statement, and her name was listed on all of the Bradshaws’ agency paperwork.

After the follow-up
CBS News
story came out in 2010, introducing the Bradshaws’ experience, CWA responded by denying that the agency had
ever had any contact with Debissa. They further argued that the process of relinquishment in Ethiopian law—that children must be vetted at three levels of government—would not allow any fraudulent cases to slip through. However, many experts on Ethiopia’s adoption system contend that most fraud and corruption occurs at the local level, when false paperwork is first created. After
Fly Away Children
was released, CWA suggested that they were being targeted for their Christian faith, as “The entire film had a very anti-Christian stance,” and that foreign countries only opposed international adoption out of a sense of misplaced nationalism and their embarrassment at being unable to provide for their own children. Finally, CWA lashed out against parents who had gone to the media, accusing them of risking the lives of Ethiopian street children who now might die before they were adopted. “This desperate country has an estimated 6,000,000 orphans of whom only .03% per year will be adopted into the United States. This means that for every child chosen for adoption there is a pool of approximately 3,000 legitimate candidates from whom to choose,” a CWA statement protested. “There is never a justification for paying a parent to surrender a child, but in Ethiopia there is also no motive to do so. The sad fact is there is no lack of children in Ethiopia needing homes, and no motive to ‘buy’ them.”

Nonetheless, the stories had their impact. In Australia the news helped lead to a temporary suspension of adoptions from Ethiopia, as the attorney general worried that corruption in Ethiopia ran counter to Australia’s Hague Convention obligations. In 2012 Australia’s government stopped allowing Ethiopian adoptions altogether, stating that an environment of “increased competition” between adoption agencies jostling to get more child referrals “makes it difficult for Australia’s Program to continue to operate in a sustainable and ethical manner.”

Conversely, in the United States the adoption lobby group the Joint Council of International Children’s Services (JCICS) launched a probe of Ethiopian adoptions after the bad press on CWA but later refused to release its findings. CWA was a long-standing member of JCICS, and the agency’s then-executive director, Tomilee Harding, was JCICS’s onetime president.

Gardner, who resigned from CWA in 2007, before the videos ever became news, complained in an open letter posted online that she felt she had been made a scapegoat. She denied that it had been her responsibility to check children’s backgrounds or medical conditions and wrote that “I also tried to be very clear with any relatives or guardians of the children that adoption is permanent, that the children would join a new family and
have new parents, that the children would become American citizens and therefore would probably spend their lives in America. I told them that if they made a decision for a child to be adopted they would probably never see that child again.”

Yet to
CBS News,
she acknowledged, “I was aware of a number of times when things were problematic. . . . And several families where children came over and the children didn’t understand that the adoption was permanent.”

NEITHER TARIKUWA,
her sisters, nor their family understood what adoption was, said Aynelum Lemma, the girls’ older sister, when I met her in Sodo in 2011. At the time Aynelum, a teacher in a local school, lived in the home they all grew up in with one of her remaining two sisters and their brother, a gracious group of young adults keeping the house together while their father’s government job took him to a neighboring town for weeks at a time.

The city of Sodo, nestled below the fog-covered hills of the SNNPR, is wide and flat, with low buildings spreading out from a central lot where buses wait, puffing fumes, and throngs of pedestrians and donkeys, burdened with goods, contend with cars on downtown streets. Street children wander, peddling carved wooden sticks sold as toothpicks, sometimes giving a coy smile before shouting
ferengi
, or foreigner—a word that can feel like an endearment or a curse—and unrolling a graceful middle finger.

Tarikuwa and her sisters grew up there, going door to door to sing for neighbors and walking to school. Among the pictures she brought with her to the United States are shots of her and her classmates after choir practice: a group of ten preteen girls, smiling in modern clothes—jeans, T-shirts, capris, and skirts. “We wore the same things there!” Tarikuwa told me defiantly. Many American high schoolers she’s encountered, whose only knowledge of Ethiopia was its mid-eighties famine, assume she played with lions and had never seen a car. In two pictures Tarikuwa has, one of Tarikuwa in the United States and one of Aynelum in Sodo, the sisters are unintentionally dressed identically, in gray Aéropostale hoodies with red bandanas over their hair. It’s the sort of evidence of modernity that Tarikuwa holds up in the face of the adoption agency claim that Ethiopians don’t know their children’s ages or their birthdates. Whereas CWA claimed to the Bradshaws that they had had to guess the girls’ ages, Tarikuwa said her father had brought their birth certificates the first time they visited the agency.

Indeed, when I met Aynelum at the coffee shop of a small Sodo hotel one day while her father was out of town at work, she knew her sisters’ ages well. Aynelum was then twenty-two, a young woman in a green sweatshirt, with neat braids and a delicately pretty but worried face, and an air of seriousness that made her seem far older. She had already been teaching professionally since she was sixteen, and as the oldest daughter in a family where the mother had died, she was the woman of the house. She approached the hotel parking lot from the city street with nervous determination, steeled, she later told my translator, for bad news about Tarikuwa, whom she knew had caused problems in the past.

Staring at her hands as she sat at the table, with a tightly controlled expression, Aynelum explained that, before the adoptions, the family of seven children had been struggling somewhat in the wake of their mother’s death. As a government employee, Lemma Debissa was relatively middle class by Ethiopian standards but still not making much. One day the family saw a presentation from Children’s Cross Connection, the orphanage organization that partners with CWA, at the local Kale Hiwot, or Word of Life Church. The church worked frequently with CCC, and that day a representative spoke to the congregation about “an opportunity to go abroad for adoption” that was open to children in the region. Seeing it as a great chance for the youngest three daughters, the Lemmas contacted CCC.

Following that, a friend of Debissa’s who seemed to be affiliated with CCC started coming to the house. He was rumored to have already put one child in his care up for adoption and to have written the girl demanding she send money from America. Tarikuwa thinks she remembers him talking about how CWA could help their single father with clothing and food. Meya insisted that she saw the friend give her father money—something Aynelum hotly denies. “We didn’t receive anything from the organization CCC or any other,” she told me. “The church people from CCC would come to Kale Hiwot and share this idea about adoption. We didn’t know, and my father didn’t know that it was for good. The organization told us that they will come back after getting a good education and a decent life—that even after only three years they might come back.”

After the girls left, the phone calls home made it clear what had happened. Aynelum said, “Finally it came to our attention that it was final, that adoption was for good.” Her eyes teared and her expression tensed as she recalled how the family learned what adoption really means. “We were very angry, very angry, when we learned that they did this thing against us. We believed it was a good opportunity for the children, not for
disclaiming our blood relationship. They are still our sisters, our family members, so when we heard these things, we were really terribly sorry and father was disappointed. If we knew that it was for good, we would not have let them leave this country or our family.”

The family is now resigned, Aynelum said, to the permanency of their sisters’ adoption, and they’re grateful for the Bradshaws, whom Aynelum describes as part of the family. In the Lemmas’ house outside the town center—a respectable compound of several small buildings, built in traditional style from wood branches packed with mud, then painted mint green—a corner of the living room wall is dedicated to framed photos of the Lemma sisters and their new family, whom the Lemmas all know by name. “The Bradshaw family is like our family,” she said. “They informed us that we are like one family.”

Still, when the sisters call from the United States, they can no longer speak the national language of Amharic, and although the families hope the sisters can one day visit, they can’t imagine them readjusting to Ethiopian life. “We know it is difficult to live here after being educated in the US,” Aynelum said.

Inside their house Aynelum showed me the family’s new furniture: a couch and a table, an elaborate Ethiopian coffee service set up on the floor. She hastened to add that they hadn’t had all that when the sisters were there, conscious that their lifestyle could be taken the wrong way. She knows that the Bradshaws’ adoption caused significant problems, as the family had written CWA to demand how they could separate a family that was happy and had a decent life. And she knows that any indication that the Lemmas are doing well could be taken as proof that they were given money for the girls to be adopted. Once, when a friend of the Bradshaws who frequently visits Ethiopia came to Sodo, the friend reported back that the Lemmas were living a middle-class lifestyle and didn’t need any help, causing what the Lemmas feel was “a gap between the two families.”

Aynelum said that although some other families in the area that relinquished children for adoption have received gifts and donations from the people who adopted their children, they don’t have that kind of relationship with the Bradshaws. “We didn’t receive anything small or big,” she said, her voice rising slightly, a rare sign of anger in a culture that prizes deference, particularly from women. “The Bradshaws sent us some small things: T-shirts, hair combs, toothpaste, and we are thankful for that.” There are other families “who have nothing,” she added, “no contact with [the adoptive] parents. They are very angry and disappointed; they are terribly sorry.”

Still, the Lemmas’ financial situation did cause conflict. After the girls were adopted the Bradshaws began to receive letters from Debissa, asking for financial assistance. They had received his bank routing number previously, when the adoption was finalized, seemingly an indication that he had been told financial support would be forthcoming. Aynelum allows that on one occasion her father had written to the Bradshaws that he was facing government downsizing and asked for financial support, as his children weren’t coming back. At the time, she recalls, the Bradshaws responded strongly, explaining that wasn’t what adoption is about.

Today, Katie Bradshaw said she no longer finds the requests insulting but rather proof that the family was misled. “I think it’s not that he was so desperate that he couldn’t provide. But here came CWA, harvesting kids, and offering this promise of America. They were telling him the girls will be able to go to college and send money back and take care of the whole family, and the people in America will help you. I believe in his mind, it was this amazing opportunity.”

On the American side, she added, “I think the damage from harvesting is so much greater than the help that’s happening. The degree of damage this does to these kids is so severe. There’s this mindset that life in America will be better and that they will be happy. But the truth is that nothing replaces family. And their family is in Ethiopia.”

“WE CAN’T COMPARE
first world families with third world families,” Stephne Bowers told me in June 2011. Bowers was then CWA’s local associate in Sodo, running three Children’s Cross Connection (CCC) orphanages in the SNNPR and living across town from the Lemmas’ home in a cottage on the grounds of the Sodo Christian Hospital. She explained that although she cries over the mothers who come to relinquish their babies, her Ethiopian staff assures her the mothers are too broken by poverty to care. “It’s not as we understand families,” Bowers assured me.

A midforties blonde from South Africa who had lived for years in Zimbabwe, Bowers came to Sodo when her American husband, Harry, was stationed as a medical missionary at in Sodo. Like Michelle Gardner, Bowers and her husband were adoptive parents who had used CWA for their own adoptions from Russia years before. A few short weeks after they arrived in Ethiopia, they spoke with CWA’s founders, Robert and Tomilee Harding, and Stephne agreed to oversee their local orphanages, building bridges between CCC’s orphanages, CWA, and the local government and community.

She also helped with CWA’s PR work, appearing in a 2009 online video with Tomilee Harding to address adoptive parents’ complaints that the stories their children told them after they came to the United States were different from the background information CWA had supplied. “We must understand that when children are on that side and on that continent, they are busy surviving,” Bowers told a nodding Harding. “They are going to withhold things and hide things that will give them the best opportunities, because that is what you do when you survive, to live, just to stay alive.” It’s not until children get to the warmth and unconditional love of their adoptive parents’ home that they open up and tell different stories, Bowers continued.

“And that’s when our phone starts ringing,” Harding chimed in. Bowers went on to discount children’s claims of having surviving family by arguing that Ethiopians call everyone “brother” and “mother” and that CWA and CCC will nonetheless “triple check, quadruple check” family backgrounds. However, in the same video conversation she also said it was sometimes too dangerous for CWA staff to verify facts about children from rural villages, where “They’re not used to white faces.”