The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (33 page)

In Tennessee Sam and the four adoptees joined Sam’s wife, Serene, a thin brunette in her late twenties who had attempted a career in the Christian music industry, and the couple’s four biological children. Together the family moved to an off-the-grid log cabin Sam was building in Primm Springs, a rural hamlet outside Nashville, nestled in the hills around Tennessee’s Amish country. During their first days in Primm Springs Serene welcomed the children with familiar foods—rice, stew, sardines—and they were photographed in clean American clothes, smiling and laughing, happy to have arrived.

The Allisons’ cabin was on or next to a compound owned by Serene’s parents, Colin and Nancy Campbell, where Serene’s two sisters and their families also live. Colin pastored a small church, and Nancy, author of anticontraception books like
Be Fruitful and Multiply
, is a fundamentalist Christian women’s leader with a large following among homeschoolers. Her free magazine,
Above Rubies
, is a thirty-five-year-old institution that focuses on Christian wifehood and the imperative to bear many children. With a circulation of 130,000 across more than one hundred countries, the magazine has spawned a circuit of local Above Rubies ladies’ retreats in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Her followers are mostly large families, with eight, ten, or twelve children, who eschew contraception and adhere to rigid gender roles, in which husbands are spiritual leaders of the home, and wives their submissive “helpmeets.”

Although Nancy’s followers include many women who look the part, in floor-length denim jumpers and modest homemade dresses, the Campbell clan can seem like a new age Christian avant garde, tracing a thin line between Plain People austerity and back-to-the-land granola. In
Above Rubies
’ Facebook album Nancy, well known for her cooing accent—the entire family emigrated from New Zealand by way of Australia—twirls in a tie-dyed peasant skirt, her eyes closed in a beatific smile. Serene and her sisters—two of the three have had ten children or more—are fixtures of the magazine. They are striking women, in form-fitting T-shirts, jeans, and cargo pants, with waist-length hair. They sell motherhood-themed CDs (“Peace All Over Me”) and raw-food lifestyle cookbooks (
Trim Healthy Mama
), and they contribute cheerful essays to their mother’s magazine about raising children in half-built homes without running water. In Nashville two of their three brothers have helped manage Australian Christian rock band the Newsboys. It’s a family that thousands of homeschooling mothers know nearly as well as their own.

In 2005 Campbell turned her attention to international adoption, specifically from Liberia, then just emerging from a fourteen-year civil war, and specifically through a handful of Christian adoption facilitators with ambiguous legal standing. As early as 2002
Above Rubies
began pushing independent international adoptions—meaning those arranged independently of licensed agencies, with parents using private brokers known as facilitators—as an economical way for Christians to conduct “missions under our very own roof!”

Three years later, in 2005, Campbell wrote about her own mission trip to Liberia, where she had spent a week visiting three orphanages, including the Daniel Hoover and Acres of Hope homes, and had come “home with piles of letters addressed ‘To any Mom and Dad.’” She touted the cost effectiveness of adopting from Liberia—“one of the cheapest international adoptions.” She also offered spurious statistics to urge readers to action: that one million Liberian infants—what would have then been a full third of the country’s population—died every year and, as she later claimed, that they were among “a billion orphans in the world today.”

She promoted three Christian adoption facilitators: Acres of Hope; West African Children’s Support Network (WACSN); and one, Children Concerned, that an
Above Rubies
family started in order to manage adoptions from Daniel Hoover and other ACFI orphanages (and which was later renamed as Amazing Grace Africa Ministries). At the time the United States licensed none of them as adoption agencies, but all nonetheless conducted adoptions out of Liberia for between $3,000 and $8,000—a fraction of the $20,000 to $35,000 that most international adoptions cost.

The fire caught. After reading
Above Rubies
, members of a group on Yahoo wrote that God had laid Liberian adoptions “heavy on [their] heart.” They asked whether there was a discount for taking more than one child. They compared notes on passing their home study, as religious convictions about corporal punishment, for example, might cause a family to fail.

“These families lined up by the droves,” said Johanna, a nurse and adoptive mother who used to read
Above Rubies
and who requested I use her first name only. “They were going to Liberia and literally saying, ‘This is how much I have, give me as many as you can.’” In July 2005 Campbell wrote that seventy children were in the process of being adopted through ACFI, most to large families; some of these families were taking as many as five children. Several months earlier, Campbell described how she had helped one adoptive father navigate the Washington Dulles airport with
his new Liberian triplets on his way to meet his wife. One of the children, Grace, a wide-eyed infant with bow lips and a Peter Pan collar, was pictured on the cover of the magazine.

Campbell also published a lengthy testimonial from Acres of Hope co-founder Patty Anglin, her personal friend and a Wisconsin mother to eighteen, including eleven adoptees. She printed another from the Ahlers family of Kentucky, who would adopt five children from Liberia. The Ahlers marveled at the helpfulness of the older girls, who learned to make thirty loaves of bread for the family on “bread day” and had taken over laundry duties. Between 2005 and 2008
Above Rubies
published nearly twenty articles touching on what came to be shorthanded as simply “Liberian adoption.”

From 2003, when the first facilitators arrived in Liberia, until 2008, the State Department counted more than twelve hundred Liberian adoptees entering the United States; almost eleven hundred of them arrived during the years
Above Rubies
was heavily promoting the cause. More were adopted to Canada, and others likely bypassed official channels. “From my article in
Above Rubies
about the children in Liberia there must have been up to a thousand children adopted,” Campbell estimated in an e-mail to me, “and most have been a blessing.” Almost an entire children’s chorus from ACFI, known as the Liberian A Capella Boys Choir, had been adopted into families outside Charlotte, North Carolina, two years before Campbell’s campaign, when the orphanage had been attacked in 2003. Over the next few years nearly forty more Liberian children came to greater Charlotte, a phenomenon featured in a photo spread on the “Hallelujah Chorus” in Oprah Winfrey’s
O
magazine.

In September or October 2005 Sam Allison arrived home with his and Serene’s four adoptees, and the newly expanded family was featured in
Above Rubies
. In the photograph Sam sat on one end of a couch, his hair in microbraids, and Serene on the other, with a line of eight grinning children between them.

The next year I happened to visit Nancy Campbell at her home to interview her about her teachings on large families and contraception. At the end of a long driveway I was greeted by three dogs and two tow-headed toddlers, who wordlessly guided me from my car to the living room. Nancy told me that she was adopting three Liberian children, whom she hoped would arrive by Christmas, as part of what she would describe in
Above Rubies
as her “vision of finding families for the children in this nation of orphans.” She ended up adopting four; Serene took a
total of six. “If God is putting it on your heart to adopt, start the process!” Campbell wrote in 2005, promising that the necessary funds would follow readers’ leaps of faith. “When we welcome a child into our heart and into our home, we actually welcome Jesus Himself.”

ALTHOUGH LIBERIAN
adoption gained a viral popularity among
Above Rubies
followers, in Monrovia the process was operating in a state of near lawlessness. The country was just two years out of a war that had touched nearly everyone who had survived it and left its infrastructure shattered. Nearly a decade later, buildings around Monrovia are still pocked from wartime gunfire.

For Acres of Hope’s Anglin, the impact of
Above Rubies
’s promotion was jarring. “So many people responded, and they were responding at an alarming rate. Adoptions started to boom instead of growing slowly and naturally,” she said, pointing to what she considers Campbell’s regrettable characterization of Liberian adoptions as “cheap, easy and fast.” But the characterization was true. Acres of Hope’s adoption fees cost from $3,000 to $6,000, and they ended up brokering more than six hundred adoptions from the time Anglin arrived in Liberia, just days after the 2003 ceasefire, until the program shut down in early 2009.

In Liberia the adoption fees represented a potential windfall, and local operators emerged to supply children. The number of orphanages jumped from around 10 before the war to between 114 and 120 after, and they began to find children to match adoptive parents’ desired gender and ages. In 2006 Liberia, which then had only three million people, became the eighth-highest adoption-sending country in the world.

As in Ethiopia, Liberian parents began to complain that adoption had been represented to them as a temporary education program, similar to the country’s traditional “ward system.” Some said their children had been adopted without their consent. Meanwhile, a local WACSN staffer seemed to reinforce the misunderstanding by reportedly announcing that two of his own biological children had been adopted and were now “benefiting from the program.”

The postwar government, functioning without reliable electricity and Internet, let alone sufficient numbers of trained staff, was unable to monitor children leaving the country. Lydia Sherman, Senior Coordinator for Liberia’s Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, told me that the high level of adoption “was understandable during the heat of war, but it
continued. Children were being sent out of here six, seven at a time.” Adoptions that would take most of a year in other countries could happen in weeks or days in Liberia.

Cheryl Carter-Shotts, founder and managing director of Americans for African Adoptions, one of the few licensed agencies operating in Liberia at the time, said that the government wasn’t able to distinguish licensed American adoption agencies from groups that merely had US nonprofit status. When nonprofit facilitators like WACSN were caught acting as agencies, “They would say, ‘We’re doing a private adoption,’” meaning they claimed they were only assisting families through an independent process. Bribery was also rampant. Carter-Shotts told me that the founder of WACSN, Maria Luyken, a Liberian-born Minnesotan who did not respond to my interview requests, advised her to “stick a couple of hundred-dollar bills” in her letter when she met with a government ministry—a charge confirmed by Dirk Helmling, a North Carolina pastor and adoptive parent to four Liberian children whose wife would later take over WACSN’s US operations. “She had to pay people off to get the paperwork done,” Helmling told me. “What we were told is that everybody was doing the same thing. In order to get kids out, you had to pay these bribes.”

In 2006 Liberia’s National Legislature called a hearing on allegations of child trafficking. A 2007 joint report by UNICEF and Holt International Children’s Services found that children were entering the adoption system through “fraudulent means” and “false promises” to parents. But the facilitators continued to flourish with the help of
Above Rubies
readers. WACSN, which had been a children’s relief group during the war, seemed to tailor its operations to Campbell’s followers, working with a volunteer stateside representative named Pam Gremillion, a Memphis woman on the edge of the Mennonite community who dressed herself and her three Liberian daughters in Amish- or Mennonite-style bonnets and layered dresses. Under the stewardship of “Sister Pam,” WACSN promised that Liberian adoptions were “uncommonly uncomplicated” and “uncommonly affordable,” and it declared that the organization would work only with biblical literalists. Their initial application materials focused largely on prospective parents’ relationship with Jesus and how God had led them to adopt.

In 2009, as “Liberian adoption” reached its climax, WACSN drew a stage full of US preachers to Monrovia for a crusade called “How Big Is God?” One of the organizers of the three-day revival had blogged that readers at home could get involved by adopting through WACSN. “If you
are interested in this vision, even if you have the least bit of interest, please contact me,” one wrote. “Heck, even if you HATE the vision and think it’s a stupid idea, contact me and at least give me a chance to talk you into it.”

“EVERYTHING WAS
good for a month,” CeCe, the Allisons’ oldest adoptee, told me about life in Primm Springs. She is now a twenty-one-year-old woman with a maternal face and a family of her own. “We got to the next month, and things started to get a little weird.”

Serene’s raw-food prescriptions, like green-leaf smoothies or kefir, were unfamiliar to the children, and if they balked at eating her food, some of the children say Sam would hit them. Other cultural differences emerged, such as the children’s use of Liberian English or the Liberian prohibition on children looking adults in the eye. “They’d say, ‘You are so rude. I’m talking to you, you should look me in the eye,’” CeCe remembered when I first spoke to her in 2010. “My mom started complaining a lot to my dad. They expected us to adapt to things in a heartbeat.”

In October 2006, a year after their first adoptions, the Allisons adopted two more Liberian teenagers, Kula, thirteen, and her fifteen-year-old brother, Alfred,
*
whose parents had put them in the Daniel Hoover orphanage during the war to keep them safe. They had been at the orphanage at the same time as CeCe, and under the Allisons’ supervision, CeCe had called Kula to entice her with stories of American life. The children arrived at night, and the darkness of rural Tennessee surprised Kula. “In Africa we thought America was heaven. I thought there were money trees,” said Kula. Now a nineteen-year-old woman with olive-shaped eyes and soft, shoulder-length curls, Kula recalled her confusion when she woke the next day and found her surroundings at odds with her expectations. It was “like a dream, not what I expected, not what they said it was.” After a little while, though, she thought that the Allisons’ lifestyle must be how everyone in America lives.