The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (32 page)

Although these shifts might have fallout on many in Ethiopia’s adoption economy, some “industry jobs”—like those searchers do—likely won’t end any time soon. With thousands of children adopted out to the United States and Europe in the last decade, the searcher Samuel foresees a large, new market: children who will grow up to learn of the circumstances around adoption from Ethiopia in the 2000s and will be in need of information about their background that bankrupted agencies can’t provide. Whereas Oklahoma adoptive mother Kelly paid $900 for her searcher in 2009, she has since heard that he increased his rates to as much as $3,000 to $4,000 per search. Samuel had plans in 2011 to integrate his business with the agency Kingdom Vision in order to provide DVDs for all their clients. When rising demand made adoption an important source of revenue in a country that had little of it, even investigators who found themselves at odds with agencies seemed to find a place in the adoption economy.

But on the other side of the equation, in Ethiopia little infrastructure was left in some areas to provide families with information about the children they had relinquished. In the communities around some orphanages that were closed, such as the Gelgela orphanage in Durame, in the SNNPR, Ethiopian families who had been receiving regular updates about their children through the orphanage—sent by adoptive parents in the United States or Europe—were suddenly left without any word, said Karin Schuff, an adoptive mother who had adopted a child from the home. When Schuff was in the area in August 2012 to help establish a sponsorship program for local families, within a matter of hours she was approached by four families “who begged us to find their children’s adoptive families for them, one way or another.”

Ideally, Webb hopes, some of those who had been involved in the country’s orphanage and adoption sector can instead become childcare advocates with a larger vision of child protective services than simply adoption, instead trying to ensure families don’t fall apart in the first place. “We’re moving away from this ‘orphan’ labeling and targeting,” said Webb. “The ‘orphan crisis’ is a term that’s been used to raise money from people who really want to do something useful, but it’s actually unethical. For me this is not about orphans but about kids who find themselves outside of family care, and poverty is a major determinant of that. Two-thirds of the children in this country live below the poverty line. The adoption discussion is an entry point, but it’s not the issue. It never has
been. It has become the issue though. Because many Westerners care deeply about it.”

Whether the Christian adoption movement takes these lessons to heart remains to be seen. What happened in Ethiopia followed neatly in what Parents for Ethical Adoption Reform Vice President Gina Pollock describes as the five-stage process of adoption-boom countries. The first stage begins with a legitimate need for large numbers of children facing a particular crisis. In the second most of the original children have been placed, but adoption demand has grown as a result of pro-adoption advocacy that recruited potential parents. As a result, paid “child finders” enter the scene. In the third stage pressure to find children increases to keep pace with demand, and bad players begin to appear, along with suppressed stories of kidnapping or “baby farms.” “At this point,” Pollock said, “stories begin to emerge of adopting families experiencing severe issues with traumatized children for the reasons stated above, with increases in numbers of children grieving for their original family.” In the fourth stage adoptive parents begin to come forward with their experiences of corruption or fraud, and governments and adoption agencies begin to respond, while international organizations like UNICEF get blamed. In the last stage there are few young, healthy children available for adoption, special-needs adoptions rise, and governments may shut down the program. It’s a cycle that repeats year after year, in country after country.

True to form, as Ethiopia began to close, other potential hotspot countries began to emerge, and online chatter grew about adopting from Uganda, Rwanda, or the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In 2012 stories began to emerge of abuses, bribes, and corruption in DRC. For seasoned observers, it wasn’t even close to a surprise. “If the demand is blocked by the system, how will it be satisfied elsewhere?” Webb asked. “History has shown us that, when you push one country, another one pops up.”

IN 2007, LESS THAN A YEAR
into their adoption, Katie and Calvin Bradshaw sent Tarikuwa, who was still grieving heavily, to live with her adoptive grandparents, Mike and Mary Nelson, Katie’s mother and father, in Iowa Falls, Iowa. The Bradshaws told Tarikuwa she needed a break from the stress of adjusting to life in their house: there had been conflicts over using their Ethiopian names, over the girls continuing to speak in Amharic instead of English, over Tarikuwa’s continuing demands to be sent home to Ethiopia. When Tarikuwa asked her adoptive
grandparents when she was going to return to the Bradshaws, the Nelsons told her she was going to stay with them instead. For Tarikuwa, it was the second time she was put on a plane, expecting to return, only to find out after she had arrived that it was permanent.

The Nelsons, whose children were adults, adopted Tarikuwa themselves and tried to help her heal. Mary Nelson would cry with her and say she wished that they could help her go home, but they had been told it was illegal. The Nelsons were legal guardians to another girl from Ethiopia, an adopted teenager who had also gone through a fraudulent adoption and had since been bounced between three other families before landing in Iowa—a story that hints at the world of failed adoptions that has grown in the wake of the boom.

As Tarikuwa grew older and neared eighteen, she began to talk increasingly about using her independence to return to Ethiopia and make a life out of activism around international adoption fraud. Her focus on it seemed to make the Nelsons and the Bradshaws somewhat uneasy; both families said they had had their share of the spotlight. Then, in January 2012, what began as a routine family fight over unfinished chores turned into a break. Mary Nelson challenged Tarikuwa that if she didn’t like living under their rules, she was free to leave. Tarikuwa took what is a familiar ultimatum for US teenagers literally and moved out.

After a few weeks of staying with friends she moved to Maine, to the home of Nate Day and Lisa Veleff-Day, Portland-area parents to two Ethiopian siblings and among the community of adoptive parents who had lobbied to liberate the searcher Samuel after he was imprisoned in Ethiopia. Although Veleff-Day hadn’t employed Samuel herself, she had used the same agency that had helped jail him and had come to doubt their ethics. Her adopted children told her stories of agency staff coming to their family’s house prior to their relinquishment—seemingly a story of coercion—and when the Days had arrived in Ethiopia to finalize the adoption, the agency’s in-country staff pressured them to tell the US embassy that the birthparents were dead, threatening that they might not get their children if they refused. “Right before we went into the embassy, we were told that there were certain things we needed to say. We were being coached. They were telling us to lie,” said Veleff-Day. “We really felt like we were over a barrel, so we did what they said. I’m not proud of that, but they waited this long to coach us, because otherwise we wouldn’t have felt as compelled to do what they said.”

It was no coincidence that Tarikuwa came to know them; the world of adoption reform advocates is a small one, and Tarikuwa had stayed with Veleff-Day and her husband the previous month when she had flown
there by herself to look at colleges in Maine. But the trip had caused tensions back home in Iowa. When Tarikuwa moved there after the family fight, the Nelsons and the Brad-shaws reacted with alarm, accusing Veleff-Day of wooing Tarikuwa away in the midst of a domestic crisis.

Katie Bradshaw didn’t want to discuss what she called a private family matter. Mary Nelson wrote to me to describe her sense that a small conflict had escalated into a breakup because of outside adults’ interference. “This is not a failed adoption,” she wrote. “It is a family situation between parents and an adult daughter that outsiders intruded into.”

For their part the Days say they just told Tarikuwa, after she had moved out, that she had a place to stay if she needed one. They had witnessed their own children struggle for many months with the aftermath of adoption; now they just wanted to offer Tarikuwa a fresh start to finish high school and get on with her life. Tarikuwa gets along well with their children, biological siblings aged five and eight years old, who pile on top of her to cuddle and trail her around their house.

On the whole the conflict seems an illustration of what David and Desiree Smolin, the adoption reform advocates whose Indian daughters were fraudulently taken from their mother, call the long fallout of “abusive adoption practices.” The lies and coercion of corrupt adoptions, wrote the Smolins in a 2012 presentation for the Joint Council on International Children’s Services, can have repercussions for everyone impacted by the adoption, affecting adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, extended families, and even larger communities. Many are left with severe emotional wounds and little means of resolution, unable to trust in the foundational relationships of their lives or whether anything they’re told can be believed.

“The problem with lies,” the Smolins wrote, “is that they cast doubts on all that follows. One never again knows with certainty whether one is dealing with lies or truth.” In an adoption industry in which false information has become so routine that prospective adopters must contractually agree to accept that their agency may be telling them lies, those affected by corrupt adoptions can end up feeling “it is no longer possible to know anything at all with certainty.”

WHEN I VISITED TARIKUWA
in Maine in 2012, at Lisa Veleff-Day and Nate Day’s comfortable rural home, she hefted a pile of photos and letters onto the bed of her new roommate, the Days’ five-year-old daughter. It was the third home Tarikuwa has had in America, and she has collected more photos with every stop.

For Tarikuwa, at least for the time, this one felt like a relief. Arriving as an adult, even if one still in high school, she said she didn’t feel pressured to be a full part of the Day family—something she finds difficult while still mourning her lost life in Ethiopia—or to feel grateful for an adoption that she feels destroyed her own.

She looks at her photos of Ethiopia with incredible wistfulness. In her mind the country she was torn from has become everything the United States is not, such a paradise that the adults in her life fear that the reality will be a disappointment when Tarikuwa finally returns to visit, as she plans to do after high school.

Mary Hatlevig, Tarikuwa’s former teacher and longtime mentor in Iowa, is afraid that when Tarikuwa makes it back, “Ethiopia won’t be as wonderful as she remembers. We’ve talked about that, about how things we remember aren’t exactly as we [recall] them to be.” Everyday life will be poorer and tougher than in Tarikuwa’s memories, and the technology and luxuries she’s come to take for granted will be absent there.

Tarikuwa’s sisters Meya and Maree, with whom she talks occasionally—though the family tensions have strained those bonds too—themselves returned to Ethiopia in the fall of 2012: Maree for several months and Meya for perhaps as long as two years to work with local missionaries. Katie Bradshaw said she tried to prepare the sisters to be confronted by relatives and friends who will ask them for money, assuming they’ve come back rich from their “trip” to America. Tarikuwa already has been asked; after once sending $20 to a sister who was in nursing school, she has denied other requests, so that her family understands “adoption isn’t about sending money home; it’s about losing your parental rights.”

“What we hope for the girls,” said Bradshaw, “is that eventually we’ll reach a place where they can find some peace with what happened. Not to be happy about it, but to find peace with it and in their life. Whatever that means—going home, or establishing a different life, or being with us—we are willing to accept it.”

In May 2012 Tarikuwa finalized the legal change of her name from Journee Bradshaw back to Tarikuwa Lemma in “two very happy minutes” at a Portland court. At 3:30 that afternoon in Maine she called her family in Sodo via Skype, a month before Ethiopia’s authoritarian government announced a ban on Internet calling programs, to tell them the news. Across the country, while I sat at Saddleback Church at the Christian Alliance for Orphans conference, I received a text from Lisa Veleff-Day. “I am listening to the ululations of the Lemma family,” she wrote, “as they celebrate Tarikuwa’s return to her real name.”

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*
The book’s subtitle was slightly changed for publication of the paperback to
One Woman’s Odyssey to Rescue Her Country’s Children.

CHAPTER 5

A Little War

A
s traumatizing as a corrupt or wrongful adoption can be, it’s not yet the worst outcome for adoptees whose best interests haven’t been taken into account.

In the fall of 2005 Sam Allison, a housepainter in his thirties from Tennessee, arrived at Daniel Hoover Children’s Village, an orphanage housing more than four hundred children outside Monrovia, Liberia. Allison had come to adopt three children. He ended up with four: a five-year-old girl, to be renamed Cherish; her nine-year-old brother, Isaiah; their thirteen-year-old sister
*
, CeCe, who had taken care of her siblings for years; and a sickly infant from another orphanage named Engedi, whom Sam said he and representatives from the second orphanage had found when they’d gone “deep into the bush.”

The older children were happy to go. The orphanage was run by African Christians Fellowship International (ACFI), a “church planting” ministry that often had food shortages and rarely had school. For years Isaiah had been sexually abused there by an older ward. Once, during Liberia’s civil war, a twelve-year-old boy held a gun to Isaiah’s head. In 2003 rebels attacked the orphanage and the children all fled, with CeCe carrying Cherish and pulling Isaiah by the hand as she ran, guns firing behind them. Liberian kids called America “heaven,” and adoption, in a way, seemed like a ticket home for citizens of a country settled in part by
freed American slaves, a nation that still sees itself as a fifty-first state, or at least an abandoned colony.