The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (30 page)

Samuel’s story is not the only example of agencies using local clout to silence critics. In 2009 Arun Dohle, a researcher for the adoption reform nonprofit Against Child Trafficking (ACT), traveled to Ethiopia to investigate twenty-five adoptions handled by the Dutch agency Wereld-kinderen Child Welfare Association. The agency commissioned the research, but when Dohle’s findings led to him being “put out” of the country, ACT published the report independently under the title “Fruits of Ethiopia, Intercountry Adoption: The Rights of the Child, or the ‘Harvesting’ of Children?”

“We were seriously threatened by the orphanage directors and by the local representative of the agency we were working with as well,” Dohle
told me. “We got a letter from Ethiopian orphanages saying we were involved in illegal adoptions. . . . The social worker [I was working with] was accused of damaging the image of Ethiopia. . . . It proves you can’t do independent research.” He added, “Of course [the research] was actually legal, but they were dropping high-up names of politicians.”

In his research Dohle found that a majority of the twenty-five cases involved clear ethical concerns. These included living and easily identified parents listed as dead or unknown, agency or orphanage representatives giving false information on court documents, parents relinquishing children in the stated hopes of receiving support from adoptive families, and orphanages recruiting children directly from intact families. He recorded testimony stating that some child recruiters are salaried employees of orphanages and work to collect children from villages, health centers, and other places families visit. Overall he found that Ethiopian families don’t have the same understanding of adoption that Western agencies do. The report explains that Dohle’s research came “to an abrupt end” when a local representative of the agency “threatened to report the researcher to the Ethiopian Immigration or Police.”

Officials from two orphanages that Dohle had identified as problematic (both of which the Ethiopian government has since closed), Bethzatha Children’s Home Association and Gelgela Integrated Orphans and Destitute Family Support Association, sent a letter to Wereldkinderen accusing Dohle of engaging in illegal adoptions; of “terrorizing the families of the children who have been placed in the Netherlands” by claiming that the children are being sold for compensation, for organ harvesting, or for experimental HIV medication testing (his report made none of these claims); and of taking “persons”—presumably the birth families Dohle was researching—hostage during interviews. “These situations have proven to be rather problematic to our operations,” the letter stated. It demanded that all adoptions to the Netherlands be investigated, claiming that Dohle’s research impugned not only the orphanages in question but the government of Ethiopia as well.

ALTHOUGH SAMUEL
typically finds little more than discrepancies in the children’s ages—younger children are more attractive to adoptive parents, Samuel imagines, because they are like “empty papers,” with no past and no history—sometimes he finds that birth families are alive when they were said to be dead. Sometimes the birth families received no word about their children despite agency promises for updates. One birth
family was not even aware their child had been sent to America. Sometimes, Samuel said, birth families are complicit in these falsehoods, making stories they think are more conducive to getting their children adopted. “People are promoting adoption to foreigners, and the birth families were fooled by some adoption advocates,” Samuel said. “They got the wrong information about adoption: that if you send this child, you will get some money from the adoptive parents and you’ll be someone great.”

In 2011 I accompanied Samuel on a birth-family interview: a trek deep into the rural countryside outside Sodo to locate the family of a toddler girl adopted and living in Canada. We took a twelve-mile drive through rural roads so pitted it took more than an hour: first over dirt through-ways cutting across wide expanses of grazing land; then off road toward a hamlet so small and remote, with just a few houses and an HIV clinic, it might have been impossible to find without a guide; then even further, on overgrown backcountry paths where our Land Rover got stuck in deep trenches of mud. There, a handful of local children emerged shyly from bordering fields to lead us the last half mile on foot until we reached a solitary rectangular house, mud-walled with a skeletal wood-branch fence and surrounded by lush gardens of cassava, mango, and coffee trees.

We came unannounced, as there was no way to contact the family ahead of time, and found only a toddler boy standing in the front yard in a long-sleeved jersey and naked from the waist down. The boy stared as Samuel’s crew filed into the yard: Samuel’s “journalist,” a stocky man in a florid button-down who conducts the birth-family interview, and Semayat, a social worker from the adoption agency, Kingdom Vision, which facilitated this child’s placement. There was also me, my translator, Yosef, and a photographer traveling with us.

We walked up to the house, which had three shuttered windows and unpainted mud walls decorated with a trim of shiny blue and silver streamers extending in a crisscross pattern along its front wall. Above the doorway, in the spaces around the trim, was taped a child’s graded chemistry test, a miniature Ethiopian flag, a political poster instructing people to vote for the ruling party, and a banner, handwritten in Amharic, reading, “You can love 1,000 people and you go a long way to do this, but there is only one person who can love you, and it’s me.”

Semayat, the social worker from Kingdom Vision, explained that the family’s father had died, leaving them vulnerable in a region periodically struck by “green famine,” when the crops are still growing or are in between plantings and there isn’t ripe produce to eat. Though he hadn’t
worked on this adoption, Semayat said the family would have approached their local
kebele,
which would have instructed the agency to investigate whether they were candidates for relinquishing a child: assessing the family’s available resources, livestock, and land. In what seemed like no time the spectacle of out-of-town visitors carrying camera equipment drew nearly thirty neighboring children and adults, who leaned against trees and watched solemnly in jeans, T-shirts, and tracksuits while Samuel framed shots of the exterior of the house.

The birthmother Samuel sought to interview, a widow in her early forties with six other children, five of whom still lived at home, was called from a neighbor’s house to host her unexpected guests. She smiled obligingly, without question, when Samuel and his colleagues explained that they had come to film for several hours at the request of her daughter’s new adoptive parents. Her response was a testament to the rural setting—unexpected guests may be interrupting work but are unlikely to be interrupting appointments—as well as the privileged position of wealthier, more urban people arriving suddenly at the doorstep of the country poor.

Given what a production our visit became, it was easy to understand why adoption scholars remark that the very fact of adoptive families visiting birth families in Ethiopia’s rural villages can become an aspect of adoption coercion, convincing other parents to relinquish too. As Smith Rotabi wrote, “The activity itself may well be a mechanism for recruitment of other families and the result may be the identification of children who were, prior to the practice of village visiting, well-cared for in a family system.” The mother at this house, unnamed at Samuel’s request, had relinquished her daughter after two neighboring families had done the same.

Samuel and his team found a place to interview the mother: behind the house, following a diagonal path of rich red earth through a backyard garden, into a lane of cleared grass bordering several fields of greens, corn, and “false banana.” Down a sloping hill several goats grazed, tied to wooden stakes in the ground, with gentle hills rolling into mountain peaks in the distance.

Sitting in a chair in the fields behind her house, her fingertips pressed together and her eyes cast down, the mother solemnly answered dozens of questions about her background, her remaining children—all looking healthy and well clothed—and the circumstances of her husband’s death, which had prompted the adoption. She answered as though she were complying with an official request, without emotion and with clipped answers of one or two words. It was nonetheless a lengthy process, as each
question had four parts: Samuel’s journalist asking questions in Amharic, Semayat translating them into the local language of Wolaita, the mother answering, then Semayat translating back into Amharic. The team would translate the conversation to English later, back in Addis.

After the interview Samuel took b-roll footage of the house and the neighbors. Several of the men who came by from nearby houses, crafted in the traditional roundhouse, thatched-roof style, brought a steer into the mother’s front yard to pull a wooden hoe across the red dirt and grass, demonstrating for the camera Ethiopian agricultural chores: a simulacrum of rural living for a child who will grow up in Canada to watch and rewatch a handful of images from Ethiopia, as foreign to her as pictures in
National Geographic
.

Among the crowd of neighbors was a twenty-two-year-old woman named Adanech who explained the local understanding of adoption by citing
gudifecha.
That’s the Ethiopian custom of informal adoption, when another family raises a child temporarily but always with the understanding of who the child’s parents are. “They believe the children will come back and be part of the family,” my translator, Yosef, told me.

This cultural difference in the term “adoption” is a misunderstanding that some agencies seem to perpetuate, equivocating on whether children will come back, although very few children adopted to the United States ever return to their countries of origin for more than a one-time visit, if at all. As Semayat told Yosef, “Until age eighteen the child could stay in the adoptive parents’ home. After that the adoptive child has every right to decide whether to live here or to stay there. The family knows the blood relationship is always there, so wherever the child is, it belongs to them.”

In a way this points to the larger question of how adoption is functioning in traditional societies facing rapid modernization. Adanech, who attended school until the tenth grade, said that while there’s generally enough food in the area, there’s usually no money to buy things that can’t be grown or processed on the land—no oil, no sugar, often no shoes. Although these items weren’t components of life in the past, they’ve become customary, even in remote areas, and families now see their absence as a deprivation. They grow ashamed of their circumstances, suggests Yosef, and seek for their children to do better. “They’ll think they’re not in civilization, and the whole concept of their humanity will be in question, and they’ll wish for their children to go anywhere—not only to the US but also [Ethiopian cities like] Awassa, Wolaita, Addis Ababa,” Yosef told me. He pointed out that the whole village had assembled on the mother’s yard because they believe we—
and me in particular—had come not just to make the video or to report but rather to pick out another child “and maybe give an opportunity for another family.” “This is going to be a celebration,” he said. “Coffee is going to be prepared and served.”

And it was, in an elaborate ceremony in keeping with Ethiopian tradition, with coffee beans roasted, hand ground, and brewed strong, then served to us guests as we sat on a log in the front yard. A circle formed among the children, and the girls shook their shoulders in the traditional Wolaita dance I would later see adult women perform at a local nightclub, where the DJ alternated between regional songs and Bob Marley. At the end Samuel presented the mother and her children with a stack of pictures from Canada. They sat on a bed inside the house carefully shuffling the photos as Samuel filmed and a dozen neighbors watched from the corner, under a poster of two doves taped to the wall, reading in English, “love is enough.” When Samuel was done the mother looked up at me, the only white person in the house, and smiled as she pointed to a picture of her daughter’s adoptive mom, asking if that was me.

IN 2009 A GLUT OF ABANDONMENT
cases from orphanages in Addis Ababa prompted Ethiopia’s First Instance Court, responsible for approving all international adoptions, to announce it was temporarily suspending hearing abandonment cases that originated in the capital while it investigated the reason for the surge. The court continued to hear adoption cases for children abandoned in other parts of Ethiopia, however.

Following this announcement, a van from Addis carrying seven children and babies was stopped as it was driving outside the rural town of Shashemene, in central Ethiopia. The children in the van were wards of Better Future Adoption Services (BFAS) and had been declared abandoned in Addis Ababa. Police outside Shashemene stopped the van, and seven adults were arrested, including five BFAS employees. The adults were accused of trying to process the children as abandoned in another region so their adoptions could proceed without delay.

One of the children transported to Shashemene would later be adopted by a Christian couple just outside Nashville, Tennessee: thirty-one-year-old Jessie Hawkins, a health and wellness author, and her thirty-eight-year-old husband, Matthew, a marketing executive. The Hawkinses had chosen BFAS as a protection against corrupt adoptions, assuming that because an Ethiopian woman living in the United States, Agitu Wodajo, ran it, the agency would operate more ethically than agencies
without a local connection. Wodajo’s public professions of Christian faith were reassuring as well.

Before the children were transported to Shashemene, BFAS notified Hawkins and the adoptive families for the other six children that they were moving the children to an orphanage that was cleaner and safer. (Wodajo later told me the improbable story that the children were moved not to change their abandonment paperwork but because a colleague of a BFAS staffer wanted to set up his own orphanage in the region and had asked to “borrow” BFAS children to pose as his wards when inspectors came to check.) The families didn’t learn until much later that the party had actually been arrested.