The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (44 page)

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Earlier in 2012 the Congressional Coalition on Adoption distributed a survey that was at first represented as though it were an official USCIS questionnaire, asking prospective adoptive parents to answer questions about their interactions with US officials during the adoption process. JCICS and the Christian Alliance for Orphans promoted the survey online, with the Alliance blog announcing that the results “will be made available to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for use in an upcoming roundtable on inter-country adoption.” To adoption reform advocates like past PEAR board member Pam Veazie, the campaign was really an advocacy tool to collect stories from prospective adoptive parents facing roadblocks in their adoptions, misleadingly represented as a neutral government survey.

CHAPTER 7

A Thousand Ways to Not Help Orphans

I
n May 2011 Dave and Jana Jenkins, US missionaries living in Kigali, Rwanda, began fostering a two-month-old baby named Gabriel Mugisha. Gabriel had been born ten weeks premature, then abandoned by his mother at the Rwamagana Hospital in the country’s rural eastern region. After an eight-week stay in the hospital, where the staff gave the child one of his names—Mugisha, meaning “Blessed Boy”—family friends of the Jenkins asked whether the couple could care for the child.

Dave, an athletic-looking, bespectacled forty-five-year-old, was the senior pastor of Christ’s Church in Rwanda, which he had helped establish atop one of the rolling hills that make up Kigali and on behalf of an Oklahoma church-planting group called Rwanda Outreach and Community Partners (ROC). Jana, a forty-four-year-old redhead with a practical, straightforward demeanor, also served with ROC as a missionary in addition to working as an independent facilitator for US parents trying to adopt from Rwanda. Rwanda did not allow adoption agencies to work within its borders, so all prospective adoptive parents applied independently, either handling the paperwork themselves or with the help of an independent facilitator—choosing mostly among a small group of evangelical women, like Jana—who serves as an in-country power of attorney.

In 2011 that was a complicated job. The year before, Rwanda had closed its adoption program amid a flurry of applications, mostly from
US Christians, so it could overhaul its old adoption legislation. In its place Rwanda was drafting a comprehensive family law in line with the Hague Convention that would establish a new adoption authority and oversee a program of deinstitutionalization, emptying Rwanda’s orphanages and placing vulnerable children in family settings instead. In part, it was Rwanda’s answer to the Way Forward Project, a pilot international development initiative established by the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute to promote family-based child care over orphanages, whether at home or abroad. Perhaps more importantly, it was a reflection of Rwanda’s deep-seated wariness of international adoption.

While those reforms were being finalized, the only adoptions still being processed in 2011 were the roughly 130 cases still “in the pipeline” from before the 2010 closure, three of which Jana was facilitating. No new applications were accepted, and later in 2011 Rwanda’s government announced that it was putting a cap of six months on all pipeline applications, meaning if a family wasn’t matched with an adoptable child within that timeframe, the government would send them a “letter of regret” and close the case. Considering that Rwanda only placed adoptions from one orphanage in the country, the Catholic “Home of Hope” in Kigali, and that those adoptions often moved at a glacial pace, a number of prospective parents feared that the adoptions they had been working on for years were about to fall through.

In many other adoption-sending countries a situation like this would have all but ensured that the child who had come into the Jenkins’ care would be quickly whisked to an international adoption placement. But Rwanda’s government insisted that adoptions undergo individualized, plodding scrutiny instead of permitting the booming free-for-all that characterized the adoption process in nearby Ethiopia. And under Rwanda’s influence the Christian adoption advocates at work in the country seemed to behave differently as well.

Unlike many Christians who have begun working on orphan-care issues in Africa in recent years, the Jenkins were longtime missionaries of the old school—immersing themselves in a foreign culture until it became their own. An American woman raised in Kenya as the daughter of missionaries, Jana had lived most of her life in Africa before moving with her family to Texas. She had returned to Africa with Dave in 1993 so the couple could themselves serve as missionaries: first in Uganda for eleven years and later in Rwanda until 2012. In Kigali the couple built Christ’s Church around a plan to expand the Rwandan middle class, a small demographic comprising just barely over 10 percent of the largely agricultural country.
Reestablishing a middle class was an integral part of rebuilding Rwanda after the devastation of its 1994 genocide, when nearly one million Tutsi ethnic minorities and moderates among the Hutu majority—two groups composing much of the old middle class—were slaughtered in one hundred days. In a country where it’s been said that “if there’s a next time,” violence will erupt over class divisions rather than ethnic ones, economic mobility was a serious matter for the church to take on.

Pictures taken of the Jenkins in younger years show a slightly fussy, conservative couple, Jana with big hair in a tie-front blouse and Dave looking like a Mormon doorknocker on his first mission. However, their portraits from Africa show a couple who had relaxed into themselves: Jana’s hair cut short to flatter her strong jaw and Dave in shorts and a T-shirt, casually wearing Gabriel in a backpack carrier. The Jenkins seemed to have learned other important lessons from their adopted countries as well. Dave blogged with respect about Muslim and atheist friends and wrote bitingly about the sort of “Afro-pessimistic” Western fundraising campaigns that featured images of suffering orphans in donation appeals, “turn[ing] a child’s dignity into a marketable commodity.” When the “Kony 2012” campaign went viral in early 2012, with US Christians presenting an ahistorical picture of the warlord Joseph Kony’s role in Uganda, Dave condemned the video as akin to “violent pornography” that made him want “to crawl outside of my white skin,” so exoticizing and bleak that it insulted the reality of the Jenkins’ longtime home.

It wasn’t surprising that when Rwanda’s Ministry of Gender and Family Promotion, known by the acronym MIGEPROF, announced its plan to start moving children out of orphanages, the Jenkins’ Christ’s Church—which had a long history with the ministry and was invited to its planning meeting in 2010—lined up to help in the way that their host country saw most fit. On Dave’s blog, he affirmed that he and his church thought the government’s plan to deinstitutionalize Rwanda’s orphanages, and find families for the children living in them, “displays the ultimate truths of God.”

Orphan-care and adoption issues were something the Jenkins and their church colleagues had already been thinking about. “For the last several years Christ’s Church in Rwanda leaders have been praying about how to engage Rwanda’s problem with Orphans and Vulnerable Children,” Dave wrote. He repeated an estimate that, including victims of genocide, HIV, and poverty, there might be as many as one million “vulnerable children” in Rwanda. Without intervention, he warned, this aging class of children would be a weight that could break the economic gains
made in Rwanda since the genocide, harming the prospects of the stabilizing middle class the Jenkins hoped to build.

But the adoption rhetoric that had taken off among evangelicals back in the United States wasn’t lost on the Jenkins either. Quoting Calvinist theologian J. I. Packer’s book
Knowing God
, Dave wrote, “‘Our understanding of Christianity cannot be better than our grasp of adoption. Adoption is the highest privilege that the gospel offers.’” Jana told me that “I think as Christians, God gave us the perfect example of adoption by adopting us into his family.” The couple had themselves adopted two Ugandan children during their long years of mission work in the country, and they led their church in observing Orphan Sunday, the annual adoption movement event originally inspired by a church in Zambia but transformed into a widespread multimedia campaign and church highlight in the United States.

Following the planning session at MIGEPROF, the Jenkins came up with one idea to complement deinstitutionalization: a pilot program called “Spoken For,” in which children found abandoned would not go into orphanages but instead directly to a network of foster parents recruited from Christ’s Church’s congregation, either Rwandans or resident ex-pats. They would thereby prevent children from being institutionalized in the first place and avoid the harm that orphanages have been shown to do to children’s development. The church would support the families with a “baby kit” of basic supplies and trainings, and the government would learn that they could turn to the church when they were faced with a child care emergency. The foster families, envisioned as a temporary solution, would care for the children until a permanent solution could be found, whether that meant reuniting them with their parents or extended biological family or placing them for adoption with Rwandan parents. International adoption would be the last resort. “It’s a temporary system while we find Rwandan families that are ready for adoption,” Jana reiterated to me in June 2011, rocking Gabriel serenely in a paisley-print recliner in the living room of her Kigali home, surrounded by cardboard boxes as their oldest daughter prepared to depart Rwanda for her first year at Wheaton College, a prestigious evangelical school outside Chicago.

The premise of Spoken For—basically, recruiting and training foster parents—was an idea foundational to child care systems in the United States and many other developed nations but one that could be revolutionary in a country like Rwanda, as that nation still struggles to establish its social and child welfare frameworks. In contrast to orphanage life, Jana
said, the children would be treated as though “you are spoken for, there is a plan for you.”

The baby the Jenkins were caring for, Gabriel Mugisha, represented the project’s trial run, and the stakes, they seemed to feel, were high. As Rwanda reformed its adoption system, many eyes were watching: from US adoption agencies on the lookout for a new country to work in; to the country’s large population of visiting evangelical missionaries, who have invested heavily in postgenocide Rwanda; to international development agencies; to Rwanda’s own government officials, wary of following in the footsteps of other adoption boom-bust nations and determined to find a way to care for Rwandan children within their own country. The Jenkins themselves seemed to support this domestic solution, as David sermonized on his blog: “Rwanda’s churches and families are the answer for Rwanda’s vulnerable children. It is time we say, ‘This is our responsibility. These children are ours. You will not take our children away.’”

Given these conflicting interests, where baby Gabe would go next—abroad to an overflowing waitlist of would-be American adoptive parents or to an extended family member or domestic adopter in Rwanda—reflected something larger than his own case. “Since there are fifty-plus [international] families that have been approved by the ministry to adopt and there are no children,” Jana told me, “I’m thinking that this time you might end up with an international family. But I’m holding off to see if some Rwandans [come forward] or if he could be integrated back into his family.” The Jenkins gave the boy his second name, “Gabriel,” meaning a messenger from God, and they looked to his unfolding story for an answer. “In our sprits we sensed Mugisha Gabriel would be a blessed messenger to teach our community what we were to do for [orphans and vulnerable children],” Dave wrote. “But how do we practically proceed? A messenger named Gabriel Mugisha will show us the way.”

FOR A TIME,
as Ethiopia’s adoption boom started to slow down and savvy adoption agencies began suggesting other countries to prospective clients, Rwanda had looked like it would become the next hotspot “source country” in international adoption. The ingredients for a boom seemed to be there. Compared to the flood of children leaving Ethiopia, the adoptions out of Rwanda had been a mere trickle. Between 2000 and 2011 fewer than 150 Rwandan children were adopted by US families, starting from just one adoption in 2000 and rising to a “peak” of 57 in 2011. Further, the country’s efforts to expedite clearance of the “pipeline cases”
before its new adoption law took effect likely inflated that number. To many adoption agencies searching for the next market supplier, that Rwanda’s “export” numbers could be increased likely seemed reasonable, especially given the extensive role US evangelicals had come to play in its public life.

The Jenkins weren’t the only American Christians tapped to sit in on MIGEPROF’s November 2010 planning meeting about deinstitutionalization and the new adoption law. National Council for Adoption (NCFA) President Chuck Johnson also traveled to Rwanda for the meeting, accompanied by representatives from Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church and Bethany Christian Services as well as another large agency with substantial ties to evangelicals and conservative US politicians, the Texas-based Gladney Center for Adoption. All were present to help advise on the creation of what would become the central adoption authority in Rwanda in the coming regime.

This wasn’t the first time these groups had spoken to the Rwandan government about adoption. In 2008 representatives from Saddleback and Gladney had also accompanied the Joint Council on International Children’s Services (JCICS) delegation to Rwanda on a two-part mission to gauge the country’s interest in permitting adoption agencies to work there and also to collaborate with Rwandan church groups in promoting adoption. The evangelical orphan-care ministry Hope for Orphans recognized their efforts, writing in 2009, “A few short years ago, virtually no children were being adopted out of Rwanda. Thanks in part to the efforts of our friends at the Gladney Center for Adoption, as well as Saddleback Church, that is now changing, and more children are finding forever families as a result.”