The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (29 page)

Worse yet, adoptive parents began to hear rumors from contacts in country of “birthing centers,” where women were paid to relinquish infants for adoption—catering to parents who want “as tiny a baby as possible,” as one hopeful prospective adopter put it on her blog—or that women had relinquished children for adoption in exchange for the promise of work, sometimes at the very child care centers where their babies were being offered for adoption. Some parents who traveled to Ethiopia saw their donated clothes, toys, and diapers sold on the street for profit. In some orphanages, evidence emerged of unqualified staff who were accused of allowing physical and sexual abuse of their children. Other orphanages gave visitors a distinct impression that something wasn’t right. One adoptive mother from Virginia told me that when she went to visit an orphanage—later closed amidst allegations that its director had promised birth families that adopters would pay them—the children had stood up and chanted in unison, in English, “We are all fine here.”

Around 2008 things started to change, said JoAnna Luks, an adoptive mother with two older Ethiopian children who runs a Yahoo discussion group for parents adopting from Ethiopia. “Some of the agencies were threatening clients who were questioning what was going on, like ‘Why is this child you referred to me still living with her birth mother?’ Then the agency threatened to take the referral away and give it to someone else. One of my friends had her agency try to make her take a psychological evaluation.”

Then, said Luks, came the rules. “There was a new rule that [adoptive parents] weren’t allowed to be seen in public with adopted children. There was starting to be an upswell of discontent about how many children were leaving the country. People started to tell stories of having rocks thrown at them or names called. The Hilton and Sheraton started to get reputations as baby hotels, full of white couples with Ethiopian babies.”

A number of adoption agencies began requiring adoptive parents to sign waivers acknowledging that the information they received about their children might be inaccurate. Some agencies began requesting that adoptive parents keep an increasingly lower profile: to not travel the country with their newly adopted children and to avoid the Hilton and Sheraton and instead stay in guest houses catering exclusively to adoptive parents.

Bit by bit the stories added up to a compelling body of evidence, and American officials started to put the brakes on Ethiopian adoptions. In March 2010 the US State Department, the body that investigates whether or not children are actually eligible for adoption to the United States as
orphans, announced through its embassy in Addis Ababa that it was placing extra reviews on adoptions originating at a particular problem orphanage that fed children into the adoption programs for three top agencies: Bethany Christian Services, Christian World Adoption, and America World Adoption. The US embassy in Addis Ababa had begun looking for patterns in the cases that were coming across their desks: the same social workers or police officers in case after case “finding” children said to be abandoned, or multiple children from a single agency who had similar background stories. It was the only tactic the State Department had at their disposal, as they can only control international adoption corruption by denying entrance visas to the adoptees.

The next month brought word that Ethiopia’s government was closing nine orphanages for providing inadequate child care and sending too many children abroad for adoption. By the end of that year Ethiopia announced plans to shutter nearly fifty orphanages and revoke the accreditation of some foreign adoption agencies, and the State Department warned prospective adoptive parents to expect delays and potentially additional requests for proof that their child was an orphan.

ON LISTSERVS
dedicated to adopting from Ethiopia, a culture war of its own cropped up in recurring fights between two groups: prospective adoptive parents still in the adoption process, often known by the acronym PAPs, and adoptive parents whose children had already come home—often parents who had encountered signs of corruption. PAPs would enter the listserv asking for advice on what agency they should use and be met with a barrage of warnings from seasoned adoptive parents who advised them to stay away from Ethiopia, which they described as an ethical Russian roulette. They told PAPs that if they were trying to adopt a healthy, infant daughter, they were contributing to trafficking. They asked in frustration how many stories of corruption would it take for PAPs to stop burying their heads in the sand. Some PAPs responded that the older adoptive parents were embittered and had an agenda to stop adoption after they had gotten theirs, charging that the proliferation of stories about corruption would itself shut Ethiopia down.

Other PAPs responded with bewilderment, asking why should all this corruption be happening when there were millions of orphans in need? One adoptive father and blogger, Dan Carroll, insisted in 2012, after facing delays in his adoption, that “Ethiopia has millions of orphans, so the incentive to purchase or kidnap children is non-existent. A simple supply
and demand model shows that the supply of children far exceeds the demand, pushing the price to zero. They can’t give the children away.”

But this ignored not only the complicated reality of orphan crisis statistics but also a basic, accepted fact of intercountry adoption: that, as UNICEF’s Doug Webb said, “If you build an orphanage, it will be filled with kids.” That is, when orphanages are created in places that didn’t have them before, suddenly that region will have more “orphans,” as poor parents see the institutions as a way to ease their burden and give their children an opportunity for better food, shelter, and education. Children who were not homeless or unparented before end up becoming institutionalized as a direct result of orphanages setting up shop in poor areas. Then adoption advocates point to the increased rates of institutionalization as evidence of the need for adoption. It’s what some have come to call “a culture of adoption,” functioning like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Many—though not all—of Ethiopia’s orphanages, Webb continued, were established because of the readiness of Western donors to support the institutions even though the orphanage model has long since been discredited in developed nations—widely understood to be harmful to children’s development. Despite that accepted assessment, the potential for profit led to an exponential leap in the number of orphanages operating in Ethiopia, with a government study Webb saw finding that many of the homes were financed from outside the country. “An estimated 40 percent of institutions here are paid for by adoption agencies, so 40 percent of institutions are here because of the interest in intercountry adoption,” he said, “leading one to argue that if there wasn’t intercountry adoption, there would probably be 40 percent fewer children in institutions.”

As Jedd Medefind of the Christian Alliance for Orphans admits, too often the children who end up in the pipeline for international adoption—which starts at orphanages—are not the same children advertised as composing the orphan crisis. The throngs of street children walking through Addis Ababa and approaching cars for spare change are almost categorically ineligible for adoption in a country where adoptees must come from orphanages that accept limited categories of children directly from their families or government authorities. Children without documentation can rarely be processed for adoption. It’s a complication that makes reaching the goal—a system in which the right children, who actually have no one to care for them, find families—something Medefind calls “the million dollar question.”

“The fundamental issue in Ethiopia is extreme poverty, and that the birth family’s idea of adoption is different than ours,” said adoption
scholar Karen Smith Rotabi. “You have a very sophisticated, legalistic society communicating with a very poor, traditional one.” Misperceptions about possible benefits from relinquishing children for adoption can take over a village quickly, she said. “It’s very dangerous stuff, playing with people’s poverty, emotions, and needs in a way that’s really quite profound.”

And it’s dangerous in other ways too. Smith Rotabi warned that Ethiopia must learn from other countries that have seen sharp rises in adoption, like Guatemala, where adoption corruption eventually came to have what she calls “hidden structures of organized crime” and critics faced so much intimidation that many hired bodyguards or, in one case, disappeared.

IN 2008 A THIRTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD
Oklahoma nurse whom I’ll call Kelly adopted a seven-year-old girl, “Mary,” from Ethiopia. It was the second adoption for Kelly, following one from Guatemala. Kelly had turned to Ethiopia in the hopes of avoiding some of the ethical problems she had witnessed in Guatemala. But even after using a reputable agency, Kelly has come to believe that Mary never should have been placed for adoption. Kelly came to this determination after hiring what’s known as an adoption searcher—a specialized independent researcher who works in a unique field that few outside the community of adoptive parents even know exists, tracking down adopted children’s birth families. “Her entire paperwork, except for a couple of names, was completely falsified,” Kelly said. Mary’s paperwork listed her as two years younger than she was, it said she had one older sister when she in fact had two younger sisters, and, most importantly, it said her mother had died years ago. “One day I said to Mary, ‘You know how your paperwork says you were five and you’re really seven?’” Kelly recalled. “‘It also says that your mom’s dead.’ And Mary goes, ‘My mom’s not dead.’ She was adamant that her mother wasn’t dead, and in fact she wasn’t. Her mom is alive, and it took our searcher just two days to find her.”

Kelly hired a searcher through a friend who had also adopted from Ethiopia. She sent copies of all her paperwork and $900 and waited for him to make the nine-hour drive from the capital, Addis Ababa, to the northern region from which Mary had been adopted. “I wanted to verify that she hadn’t been stolen. I searched with the intention of sending her back to Ethiopia if I found out she’d been stolen,” said Kelly.

The searcher determined Mary’s real birth date and that, though her birth family and mother hadn’t understood about the adoption, they were okay with Mary being in the United States now. “I can’t imagine the weight that was on her,” Kelly said of Mary. “After I told her the paperwork said her mom was dead, she thought maybe she was dead and nobody told her. So it was huge for her to know she was right, that her mother was alive. I was lucky she remembered and was strong enough to stick with her story.”

IN THE PAST SEVERAL YEARS
connecting with a searcher like the one Kelly used has become increasingly difficult. Although the information searchers bring back is often innocuous, a window into the world your child came from, searchers are also implicitly tasked with determining whether an adopted child is a “manufactured orphan”—a child with a family made to look parentless on paper. The contradictions searchers have unearthed in recent years have damaged the reputations of adoption agencies in Ethiopia. Agencies, some adoptive parents claim, have retaliated against searchers with legal action, jail time, and even death threats. In response, for a time Ethiopia’s adoption searchers went underground. Finding adoptive families willing to share the name or contact information of searchers they had used took months and, for me, months more to convince a young Ethiopian searcher I’ll call Samuel to meet with me.

For several years Samuel, a tall, soft-spoken filmmaker from Addis Ababa in his midtwenties, has traveled across Ethiopia to locate the remaining parents, brothers, sisters, and neighbors of Ethiopian children adopted to North America and Europe. For a moderate fee—around $600, plus travel and lodging for a two- or three-person crew—he creates a DVD of interviews with family members and a brief glimpse of the area the child is from. For Samuel, it’s a living as well as a source of personal fulfillment. He lost his own father at seven, and his mother, who had not had a lasting relationship with the father, could tell Samuel little more than that he had been tall. Like many others in Ethiopia, Samuel worries that adopted children who don’t know their background will face an identity crisis down the line.

Samuel started making the DVDs for a prominent US adoption agency, then later moved on to independent production, working from a script of sixty to seventy questions to ask of whatever closest relative or neighbor can be found. The questions ranged from the specific, about how each child was relinquished, to broader cultural queries about
wedding ceremonies and cultural observances in the region the child came from.

The first several times I e-mailed or called Samuel he responded with trepidation, confirming with me repeatedly that I was not associated with any adoption agencies working in Ethiopia and that I wouldn’t pass on his name or information to any of them. He had good reason to be cautious. In August 2010 Samuel was jailed for forty-one days in the northern Ethiopian province of Tigray, which shares a hostile border with neighboring Eritrea. He had traveled to the region to film two birth-family interviews, one of which Samuel said he did pro bono out of his respect for the family, which had adopted an HIV-positive child. When Samuel met the birth sister of one of the children whose story he was tracking, the local director of a US adoption agency came along and began accusing Samuel of giving the agency a bad name. (Out of fear of further repercussions, Samuel requested that the agency not be named either.) Shortly thereafter Samuel and his crew were arrested. While in jail he was told that the arrest was made at the request of the agency, which had accused him of performing illegal adoptions and filming the “bad side” of Ethiopia to sell to the Eritrean government. An employee of the agency was also arrested—it’s still not clear why—as well as three of Samuel’s friends and a translator. When a local man brought Samuel food and water, he was arrested as well.

Although his jailers treated him as a serious criminal, in time, with the help of US adoptive families, Samuel’s case reached the attention of the United States and federal Ethiopian governments. Families who had adopted through the agency raised thousands of dollars for bail and led a letter-writing campaign that spurred the Ethiopian ambassador to the United States, at the consulate in Los Angeles, to get involved. Eventually Samuel was released.