The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (38 page)

The Thompsons had an escort take him to Brussels, where Kate met him as he was waiting in a room of other unaccompanied children at the airport. He had lost twenty pounds since he had left Tennessee and has since been diagnosed with PTSD. When he started school he tested for grade 1.8. He’s struggled to learn in a few years the foundational lessons most students learn over a decade.

In July 2009, just before the Thompsons brought Isaiah home, the Allisons e-mailed him care of Anglin. “We had so many dreams and hopes together,” they wrote, “but you must now go on and complete them yourself.” They assured Isaiah they had forgiven him as well as the Thompsons “for this interference,” but they said the Thompsons would most likely want no further contact with them. They warned him against CeCe, whom they called an angry person and the reason they had to be separated. “We do not know what you will be told there, but remember the beautiful times
we had together, remember we loved you always,” they wrote. “No one can ever take away the truth of what really happened here.”

CeCe found the letter in his bag when he returned to Atlanta and was so angered that she tore it up; Kate taped the pieces to save. Isaiah had never read it because he hadn’t learned to read at the Allisons’.

IN A MODEST APARTMENT
complex behind a hospital in Monroe, North Carolina, a suburb twenty-five miles from Charlotte, CeCe lives with her husband, Samuel, a fellow adoptee she’s had her eye on since they lived together at the Daniel Hoover Orphanage. Their twenty-month-old son, Sammy, and Samuel’s sister, who was adopted by the same family as her brother, live with them. Samuel, a slim and quiet twenty-one-year-old with a face full of middle-aged worries, was among the Hallelujah Chorus boys adopted to North Carolina. Many of the couple’s former fellow orphanage mates live nearby, as did the orphanage director until recently. When CeCe and Samuel married in 2011, all of CeCe’s bridesmaids, dressed in alternating red and white strapless gowns, were Daniel Hoover adoptees. Although CeCe’s story stands out, they count a number of friends who are estranged from their adoptive families and have limited job or education prospects. “Most of them, when we came to America, there was some part of us that a lot of adoptive parents didn’t understand, that we would never be the same like their own kids,” said CeCe. “If someone said to me again, do you want to be adopted, I’d say never. . . . I don’t feel like we were adopted. We were sold.”

Samuel works days at a Tyson chicken processing plant, and in the winter of 2012 CeCe began working nights in the same division to make ends meet and intermittently tried to make extra money through a direct sales jewelry business. She had applied once for cosmetology school but didn’t have the adoption papers to demonstrate citizenship nor, at the time, education records to prove she had received at least a seventh-grade education. She’s asked the Allisons for them, but for several years they did not return her calls.

On a sunny November morning in 2011 CeCe sat with me in her living room, its sliding door looking out into a field of other apartment developments, while Sammy crawled after the family dog, a black Cocker Spaniel, nervous with love. As CeCe fed Samuel, he began to fuss. She coaxed him with loud air kisses until his chubby face, covered in baby food, erupted into fat-cheeked chuckles. “He’s the first baby, he’s going to be spoiled,” CeCe said. “You want a child to have what you didn’t have.”

The Allisons, like a number of other adoptive parents of Liberian children, never completed the stateside process of their adoptions, leaving the children’s citizenship in jeopardy. Kula found that out when she was readopted by Pam Epperly, a longtime foster mother in Oliver Springs, Tennessee, just before she turned eighteen. It was an opportunity no longer open to CeCe and Alfred, who, by the time they left the Allisons’ home, were both already too old to be adopted.

Just before Kula’s adoption, there was a routine court case to assess her remaining needs. “While in court, Kula made disclosures that disturbed our court staff as well as the judge,” a representative from a Tennessee children’s service provider, who cannot name herself or her organization, told me. With the judge’s backing, she called child protective services to start a new investigation of the Allisons. “I’ve spoken with both CeCe and Kula as well as Kate,” she said, “and all of these stories are more than enough to corroborate themselves and personal enough for me to say they didn’t just get together and rehearse.” The local Hickman County CPS office opened two cases. The staffer also made a referral to Tennessee’s human trafficking authority—the life of labor and abuse at the Allisons’ fit the bill, she said—but by the time she had enough information to register the referral, the family had moved.

In 2011, after the investigation had progressed several months—closing one case because the remaining Allison children did not make any disclosures of abuse—the Allisons appeared to leave the state. They told CPS in Tennessee that they were planning to move to Maryland, but one of the Campbells’ adoptees told CeCe they had instead gone to Texas, where Sam has family and the “Texas Rubies” are strong. In July 2011
Above Rubies
announced that Serene was moving “up country” to be with her husband, who had an unspecified military contract. Campbell told me simply that they had left Tennessee. The staffer requested an attachment—a police order to return the children—but the county did not acknowledge it. Unable to find the Allisons, the local CPS office closed the second case.

CeCe worried about her sister Cherish and Engedi, who are still with the Allisons, and feared she had broken her promise to their mother to always keep her siblings safe. At some point after their disappearance the Allisons seemed to quietly return to Tennessee, and in the summer of 2012, CeCe befriended them on Facebook. Her adopted brother Alfred, who lived on his own and worked as a caregiver, had already reached out to them months earlier, explaining to me in early 2012 that he was trying to forgive and move on. CeCe also said she had forgiven them, but more importantly, was trying to keep her promise to her mother to always
protect Isaiah and their sister, Cherish. “If I had to see them before I see Cherish, I’ll do that,” she told me in October. The Thompsons were hurt and so was Isaiah, but a distance had grown between them anyway over what began as minor family disputes: how CeCe had left the Thompsons’ house when she became pregnant before marrying her husband as well as a more recent fight about Isaiah when Kate had tried to bring him for a visit. In the wake of that fight, CeCe contacted the Allisons, asking to see Cherish, and heard back for the first time in years. When they spoke by phone, CeCe says, the Allisons asked her if she was “ready to come home and let God take control of things.”

The turnaround was unsurprising to the children’s social services worker who had requested that CPS investigate the family. “When children are abused in a situation, there is the establishment of control, over time, over the children, which is why they don’t want to talk and make any disclosures. It’s very similar to battered wives syndrome. If the children at any point established a connection, they’re going to want to return. Even though it ended badly, it’s still a connection they have.”

The Allisons did not return requests for an interview or to answer questions other than several late 2012 e-mails from Sam Allison that denied the allegations the children had made and attested that the family had since reconciled. “Me and my wife have made peace with our children and enjoy a good relationship with them now,” he wrote. “By dredging this up you are not letting us put the past behind us and go on [with] life.”

In September 2012 CeCe traveled to Tennessee to visit them and see her sister for the first time in years. Cherish was nearly a teenager, and Engedi had begun to talk. The Allisons cried, and Serene apologized, saying she had been young and hadn’t understood how to raise CeCe and her siblings. CeCe later posted a picture to Facebook of the thirty-something Serene holding baby Sammy on her lap. “First grandchild!” CeCe wrote. By the next week, CeCe had resumed friendships with the entire Campbell clan. In October, CeCe stopped responding to my phone calls—Alfred later told me that the Allisons had instructed him, CeCe, and Kula to stop discussing their story—and when she returned for Thanksgiving, Alfred and Kula came too. The Campbell family proudly posted photos of the reunion online.

IN 2008 A SMALL
Texas-based nonprofit named Addy’s Hope got into a tense dispute with Liberia’s Ministry of Health and Social Welfare. The unlicensed agency had been accused of child trafficking, and the government
insisted its clients did not have permission to take children out of the country—a charge disputed by the organization, which said it had obtained permission before. The organization’s co-founder, a devout Christian named HollyAnn Petree, rushed the children onto a plane, just missing some Save the Children staffers who attempted to stop them at the gate.

The next year Liberia imposed an emergency moratorium on international adoptions, citing “gross mismanagement” by both Liberian and US personnel as well as the need for a new adoption law. “We got reports that children were being put in foster homes in America because the adoptive parents in America did not understand the different behaviors of the children,” said Lydia Sherman. Green-carded children began arriving in Liberia, stories of abuse began to filter back, and public opinion turned against adoption. Rumors flew that children were being taken to America to have their kidneys harvested or to be trafficked for prostitution. Lydia Schatz’s birth parents learned about their daughter’s death, and Sherman had to tell them that they had forfeited their legal rights long ago. Other adoptive parents told me that the birth parents of their Liberian children tracked them down, frantic about rumors that their children might be being beaten or could have even been killed. “It just really got out of hand,” Sherman said.

Jerolinmek Piah, former Deputy Minister for Public Affairs, had headed the campaign for an adoption moratorium earlier in his career as a children’s advocate. “We don’t even know how many kids have been adopted or where they are,” he told me. “If we are hearing now that someone has been abused, and now instances of death, how sure are we that many kids are not in trouble that we don’t even know about?”

In the United States adoptive parents and agency supporters protested the moratorium in apocalyptic terms. Petree blogged about the mounting tensions, including a feverish dream she had about herself and her country director, the former WACSN staffer who had reportedly bragged of relinquishing his own children for adoption. In Petree’s dream they rolled in an inflatable tube through a pit in the earth, “from village to village gathering children” and returning them to their headquarters while a hostile army gathered around. Another adoptive parent blogged that she had dreamt about a procession of child-sized wagons carrying unwanted African orphans to hell. Sherman became a target of frustrated adopters. “I’ve been called the antichrist,” she told me. “I’ve had my life threatened.”

Dirk Helmling, the North Carolina pastor who had preached at WACSN’s “How Big Is God?” crusade and whose wife took over WACSN’s US operations as its adoption coordinator, began e-mailing
Sherman fiery condemnations in 2010, accusing her of deliberately preventing adoptions to qualified US homes. When I contacted him in 2011, within minutes he copied me on a fresh missive to Sherman, accusing her of wanting bribes and comparing her to Satan on the verge of a fall.

Outside her office window at the ministry, Sherman pointed to a four-story concrete skeleton—an unfinished hotel WACSN began building during the adoption boom. The hotel, which was to have been named New Destiny, was now strung with squatters’ laundry, flapping gently in the damp air of Liberia’s rainy season, smelling of sodden earth and smoke.

Heather Cannon-Winkelman, the founding WACSN board member who resigned after she saw clients returning adopted children like Saah Fayiah and other adoptees being abused, had, together with her ex-husband, lost nearly $500,000 in the hotel venture, which she had been bankrolling to make WACSN’s child relief work self-sustaining. When it became clear to her that WACSN’s operations weren’t working in the best interest of children, she turned information over to the Liberian and US governments about children living in abusive conditions and personally escorted the Forder children—who’d been living at the WACSN compound—to the embassy after Kimberly Forder returned to the United States and was arrested. She tried to fix what she could, supporting children left worse off for WACSN’s intervention. “I came here to help kids, and I felt like my money was dirty money,” she told me. “What we had invested went into something that was bad.”

Liberia is in the process of deinstitutionalizing children in orphanages, most of whom can be returned to families who relinquished the children only because of poverty. Those who can’t return home, Sherman said, will be put in foster care or a limited number of orphanages. In 2011 I visited Addy’s Hope’s old orphanage, located in the dirt side roads between Monrovia and the airport. In a bare but tidy concrete building a pastor and his wife cared for the remaining wards—nineteen children, aged two to fourteen, whose adoptions were halted when the moratorium was established. Like we were playing roles remembered from before, when the heyday of Liberian adoption brought hundreds of US parents on regular visits to homes like this (or at least brought their letters and promises to the orphanage wards), I photographed the children and showed them the images. The little ones peered around taller legs then came to take my hand. There was no surprise at our visit in a country where many Western visitors have come specifically to tour orphanages, and the pastor, Baryee Bonnor, had no request in return besides some
confirmation from past US sponsors that the program was over and that they shouldn’t wait anymore. “The [US] parents stopped supporting [the children] when adoptions closed,” Bonnor told me, and few Liberian parents have yet returned to claim their children. “They should say that they will not adopt them so the children can go home to their parents.”