The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (31 page)

A July 8 e-mail from BFAS to US adoptive families said that the agency was trying to locate children’s birth families in case they couldn’t be processed as abandonments. “If [the birth families] are willing, your children will be filed for court as a family member relinquishment and not as an abandonment,” the letter read. “So, BFAS is waiting for one of two things. 1) For the court to open their doors to new abandonment cases or 2) For birth families to relinquish the children so we can file immediately.” This e-mail seemed like an acknowledgement that the information on the children’s paperwork was fluid and that the agency would pursue whatever avenue seemed quickest.

Hawkins herself was told different stories about the daughter she had committed to adopt, a four-year-old girl who had been declared abandoned and whose mother BFAS now said they were trying to locate. “This is when I started to get suspicious,” she said. “I thought, if you’re so confident she was abandoned, why are you trying to find her birthmother now?” But, she continued, “You get attached to this child and you’re basically at their mercy at this point. You believe these children are abandoned, orphaned, and you’re willing to do whatever or you’ll lose this child and they’ll live there forever.”

In the weeks that passed, while the children were said to be on the road, Hawkins and the other families grew close, comparing stories they had been told. Some parents heard that many of the nannies working at BFAS were in fact the mothers of the children being relinquished for adoption, with the agency operating as a sort of de facto maternity home for poor women who had been offered a job in exchange for their infants—something Wodajo later denied. But as rumors spread that their adoptions would be terminated or libel lawsuits filed if they pushed too hard, a hush fell over the group.

When Hawkins was finally called to Ethiopia to finalize her adoption, the BFAS staff there reassured her that her daughter had indeed been abandoned. But after the girl came to the United States she began acting out, behaving violently toward a set of baby dolls she had gotten for Christmas and systematically shattering glasses she found in the kitchen. A few months later, when she had learned some English, the daughter pointed to a picture of the orphanage that Hawkins had taped to her bedroom wall and told her, “When I lived there, I missed my mom.”

Hawkins responded, “‘Honey, that’s nice of you, but you didn’t know me then.’ And then she kind of looks at me like she’s afraid she was going to be in trouble, and you could see her really choosing her words with the little bit of English she had. And she said, ‘You know, I have another mom.’”

“I can’t even begin to put into words what that feels like,” Hawkins told me. “Finding out that you have someone else’s child simply because you happen to have been born in a country where you’re more privileged than they are? You want to throw up, you don’t know what to do.”

When Hawkins called BFAS to present this information, she reached Agitu Wodajo directly. Despite the many reassurances Hawkins had received in the past that the girl was abandoned, she said Wodajo replied without hesitation that yes, she had met the girl’s mother herself.

Hawkins hired several searchers to try to find the mother and even tried bribing one of the BFAS nannies, but she didn’t have enough information for the searchers to go on. When she’s reached out to other former nannies, eventually they stop talking. As more information about how BFAS operated came to light, Hawkins had difficulty absorbing it all. The first time she read the word “trafficking” in relation to the agency, she had to sit down. “When my daughter cries herself to sleep that she misses her birthmother, having given birth before, I know that there’s someone else on the other side of the world doing the same thing. And I have her daughter. I love my daughter, and selfishly, I want to keep her forever. I want there to be this great story behind it about a child who needed a home and got one. But a lot of times I feel like we’ve done something wrong.”

IN AUGUST 2010
an Ethiopian newspaper called
Sendek,
edited by journalist Fanuel Kinfu, published an interview with BFAS’s former deputy country director, Abebe Tigabu (a college friend of Kinfu’s). Tigabu had recently been let go from his job, and he denounced the
agency in
Sendek,
accusing Wodajo of participating in numerous unethical adoption practices.

I met Tigabu and Kinfu in 2011 in Addis Ababa. Tigabu, an attorney, told me he had started working for BFAS after he consulted on the Shashemene case. He claimed he helped get the charges against BFAS employees dismissed by paying bribes of laptops and cash to those involved in the cases’s prosecution. All of the Shashemene children, like Hawkins’s daughter, went on to be adopted to the United States, and Tigabu claims that Wodajo was so pleased with this result that she offered him a fulltime job. As country director, Tigabu claims, he witnessed children’s records changed so that they were adopted under false last names, thereby destroying their ability to track their heritage later. Further, he said female employees of the agency were heavily pressured to give their own children up for adoption—children who were later declared “abandoned.”

Tigabu charged that Wodajo found other ways to obtain children for adoption, such as giving small payments to pregnant women to relinquish their children directly, in order to avoid paying larger donations to orphanages, thereby maximizing profits. “She always wanted to work out of the law,” Tigabu told me. “She collected children out of their reality, especially a number of children who had their own natural parents.” Children who had parents, he claimed, were recruited with promises to the birth parents that adoptive parents would give them gifts or payments “and change your life even” if they formally relinquished custody in court. When that didn’t work, the children’s paperwork was changed to allege they had been abandoned at an orphanage in another town. In that way, he said, “the adoption process is finalized in an easy way. There is no need for the family to appear at the court. They say . . . the parents are dead or that they abandoned the child and left the area.”

The birth families of the Shashemene children would later complain to the government that their children had gone on to the United States without the birth parents’ appearance in court to relinquish them, and they asked how that had occurred without their permission. “There is no answer to their question,” Tigabu said, “ . . . because the children went in the name of abandonment.”

After the
Sendek
accusations came out, Wodajo promptly responded by denouncing Tigabu as a disgruntled former employee who had been fired for embezzling agency funds. “Because of our Faith, ethical and professional background,” Wodajo wrote in a statement, “we had [sic] and will never ever be engaged in exploitation or use of children for exploitation under any circumstances.”

In a contentious phone interview in 2012, a recalcitrant Wodajo expanded on her defense to me, arguing simply, “What happened was we hired the wrong person” and claiming that Tigabu had coached birth parents to lie to the government in retaliation for being fired. She denied that BFAS had ever taken in pregnant women to relinquish their newborns and argued that when things had gone wrong on her watch, it was because she had been out of the country. In the case of one BFAS employee whose children had been processed for adoption as abandoned, Wodajo placed the blame on the mother, whom she claimed had her friend relinquish for her; further, Wodajo at first denied the woman had been a BFAS employee, repeatedly saying that she “wasn’t on the payroll,” before finally admitting that, payroll or not, the woman had in fact worked there part time. In any case, Wodajo argued, Tigabu had presided over that case. But she fell mute when I asked whether that meant he had processed an unethical adoption.

“Nobody pressured nobody,” she said. “You know that there are over four million orphans in Ethiopia? You don’t need to go any wrong way to get a child.” She paused, then continued. “I know it is not a clean business. I know that very well.”

In December 2010 Ethiopia’s Charities and Societies Agency revoked Better Future’s license, citing involvement in child trafficking and falsifying documents. A printed notice was posted outside the CSA offices in downtown Addis Ababa, reading that BFAS had been closed and its property confiscated. Hawkins and the other families were thrilled.

AROUND THE SAME TIME
that BFAS lost its license, the Ethiopian government vowed to clean up its system and close orphanages that existed only to feed into the adoption pipeline. In January 2011 the US State Department hosted a conference to address allegations of corruption and coercion in Ethiopian adoptions, offering the startling statistic that 90 percent of adoption cases that went through the embassy required further investigation or clarification, often regarding misrepresentations or concealment of facts intended to expedite approval.

In March 2011 came news of a system-wide slowdown, as the Ethiopian government announced that it was reducing by 60 to 90 percent the rate at which it processed children’s adoption paperwork, from approximately fifty cases per day to five. The State Department moved quickly to urge Ethiopia’s government to reconsider, offering them technical assistance to keep the process moving more quickly. Meanwhile US
adoption lobby groups, agencies, and evangelical ministries howled with outrage. One prominent advocate, Dr. Jane Aronson, the “orphan doctor” to some ten thousand adopted children, called the move “a hostage situation” in an open letter appeal to former President Bill Clinton.

The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) explained that although most Ethiopian children being adopted did fit the loose US definition of an orphan, there were troubling patterns in the statistics when they and the State Department conducted a joint visit to observe the country’s adoption program: that 51 percent of children in the cases they reviewed were under two years old and that there were too many exclusive relationships between agencies supporting orphanages and orphanages supplying children.

Ambassador Susan Jacobs, the State Department’s special adviser for children’s issues, emphasized to me at the time that the embassies had not found explicit evidence of corruption or fraudulent adoptions but rather problems in how agencies’ paperwork presented information. She said what they really wanted was for MOWA “to do some real research into these cases before they’re presented to us. We don’t want to hold up the family.”

The reason for Jacobs’s hesitancy seemed clear. Prospective parents who face delays in their adoptions are very vocal, and their cause frequently becomes political. When USCIS implemented stricter approval procedures for Ethiopian orphan visas in late 2011, the
Christian Post
accused them of having “tampered with evidence, falsified information and badgered witnesses in apparent attempts to justify not approving an adopted child’s visa application.”

But the Ethiopian government seemed intent on reforming its program. “We were treating roughly fifty cases a day,” Abiy Ephrem, a communications officer at MOWA, told me. “There were a few groups with an interest to make a profit in a short period of time. In the long term they can harvest a lot of things.”

UNICEF’s Doug Webb said that the media coverage of both CWA and BFAS had a serious impact, leading to changes of personnel in government and even the language MOWA used to discuss adoption. “They started talking to us about trafficking,” Webb said. “They started talking in terms of business, supply chain.”

After such extensive focus on adoptions from Ethiopia, Ephrem said the Ethiopian government wanted to shift the focus to the larger problems at hand. The four to five thousand children per year adopted out of the country were only ever a small fraction of the total number of vulnerable
children, and the government sought to focus instead on getting the larger number of children who never would be adopted into family settings within Ethiopia.

In July 2011, with technical advice from UNICEF and underwritten by a $100 million grant from USAID, Ethiopia’s government began implementing a massive “deinstitutionalization” plan. This plan would close a third of the nation’s orphanages, shuttering children’s homes that functioned as mere transit points for the adoption industry, and trying to establish a more holistic child welfare system that would promote Ethiopian foster care, reunification of children with their natural families, and domestic adoption by Ethiopian parents ahead of international adoption.

The program started by closing 46 of the country’s 149 registered institutional care facilities, including 20 orphanages in the area around one city alone and dozens in the SNNPR. UNICEF’s preliminary research in the region, conducted in partnership with MOWA, found that 75 percent of children in orphanages could be reintegrated with their parents or extended families. “The long-term vision is that the weaker institutions are fundamentally going to be closed, and the ones that will remain after all this is finished will be the very good ones,” said Webb. “There are people in government who are very concerned about this, but we’ve turned a big corner here. The situation is over where alleged abuses were ignored, swept under the carpet; where nobody was listening and there was too much money involved.”

Industry observers said that agencies were feeling the pressure, as staff were being laid off and organizations were considering closing—although a UNICEF analysis of Ethiopian court data in late 2011 indicated that the slowdown had already begun to reverse and that adoption processing rates were returning to normal levels. Meanwhile adoption advocates charged that deinstitutionalized children were returning to families who still couldn’t afford to care for them.

Nonetheless, Webb said that those in the adoption business were becoming concerned that the shifts would put them out of business. “Now the people doing adoption for the wrong reasons are very nervous. They need to change their focus and change them fast to keep in line with new priorities. The future lies in management of fostering and prevention work. The primary focus should be making sure families don’t fall apart in the first place. . . . If you don’t provide an alternative for staff working in the agencies, goodness knows what they might end up doing.” Some at UNICEF feared that the bad actors, newly unemployed, could contribute to child trafficking from Ethiopia to neighboring
countries. “These guys are business people,” Webb continued. “They know how to shift with demand.”