The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (48 page)

A brief statement attributed to the Jacobs’ Facebook page reaffirmed that special circumstances drove their adoption. “We are amazed by God’s story that is unfolding with our adoption . . . with what could only be explained as God’s absolute plan for his life and ours, we have been given an official referral for Gabriel Mugisha!” they wrote. They emphasized that their adoption was “completely different than other Rwanda adoptions” but also suggested it could bode well for the future. “We were processed through the new National Commission for Children office, and are hopeful this means great things for the future of adoption.” Dave wrote, “My hope is that the Hand Over will begin a new culture among Rwanda’s youth of embracing the adoption of orphaned and abandoned children.”

But for some the ceremony and the adoption it marked was not a mile marker on the forward path that Rwanda had been looking for nor an inspiration toward domestic adoption. Instead, it seemed like a return to the status quo in other countries—international adoption as the default solution, a surrender to the familiar system of supply and demand.

Among the critics was Nyanja Nzabamwita, a Rwandan who was raised in US foster care after the genocide and today lives in Sweden and has worked frequently in Rwanda as an adoption power of attorney for America World Adoption. In a strongly worded letter to her clients and contacts—a letter immediately forwarded around the small Rwandan adoption community—Nzabamwita compared the Jacobs’ adoption of Gabriel to a benevolent form of child trafficking, as the Jacobs hadn’t been next in the line of waiting parents, and she argued that the Jenkins’ personal connections with the NCC had secured an unfair advantage for Jana’s client. She warned that irregularities in the process had the potential to stop other adoptions from being completed, as other pipeline families passed the six-month cutoff without being matched with a child, and that Gabriel’s adoption could taint the system going forward. Nzabamwita wrote,

As happy as we may be for Gabe to find a forever family, we as a Rwandan adoption community must be strong enough to question the ethics in this case. . . . The definition of a Black Market adoption is one where prospective parents use influence (like that of Christ’s Church Rwanda with the NCC) or payments (to POAs, like Jana Jenkins, and to attorneys, like the one to whom the Jacobs paid money to represent them) to avoid complying with a country’s established guidelines.

Although whether the Jacobs’ adoption had any bearing on other pipeline cases was unclear, the implication that the Jacobs’ adoption was divinely ordained nonetheless bothered Nzabamwita, a consummate adoption movement insider as a Christian who attends the Christian Alliance for Orphans Summit, a former intern at the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute who had worked in Republican Senator James Inhofe’s office, and an employee of a leading evangelical adoption agency. “It is disturbing that they make this into a Godly story,” she wrote. “When God calls you to something, He does not ask you to take matters in your own hands.”

“If I had done the same thing when I was in Rwanda, I would have gone to jail,” she added to me, arguing that Jana Jenkins’ dual role as foster parent to a child and power of attorney for the family that ended up adopting him was highly irregular. “For me this was a reminder that just because Rwanda is trying to do the right thing, it’s not exempt from having these things happen.”

Jana, who said she had considered Nzabamwita a friend through Rwanda’s small adoption community, responded that Nzabamwita refused to understand the complexities of the case. She said they tried for months, without success, to find Gabe’s extended family, then waited for a Rwandan family to step up. After the extent of Gabriel’s medical needs were known and MIGEPROF helped the Jenkins get the paperwork to take him to Kenya for treatment, domestic adoption options seemed limited. “I think what it boiled down to is that Gabe was placed from a foster family into an international adoptive family, and that was different from what had normally taken place,” she said, speculating that those differences had led people to the wrong conclusions, like that she had gone and “found a baby” for the Jacobs. “Normally a child is taken from an orphanage, but that was the whole program that MIGEPROF was trying to go away from. We were trying to start something new.”

Speaking from Chicago, where the family moved in 2012, Jana laughed sadly at what she saw as a regrettable misunderstanding of a process that had been above board. The entire adoption, she said, had been overseen by MIGEPROF and then the NCC, which in the end was the body that made the match between Gabriel and the Jacobs family. “You cannot manipulate things in Rwanda,” she said. “You can’t force things to go your way. It’s not like in other African countries.”

In the end the NCC’s executive secretary, Nyiramatama Zaina, came to Gabriel’s Hand Over ceremony at Christ’s Church and was “very affirming of what we had done,” said Jana. The First Lady’s Imbuto Foundation also approved, announcing that it would award both the Jenkins and the Jacobs families its
Malayika Mruzinzi
, or “Guardian Angel” award of one cow each—a traditional ceremonial African gift—in recognition of those who care for orphans.

Since he had come to the United States Gabriel has been diagnosed with cerebral palsy but taken off the strong antiseizure medicines he had been given in Africa; so far he has remained seizure-free. The Jenkins visited him in Texas, as did other families from Christ’s Church who had traveled through the United States since his adoption and wanted to check in on a baby they still considered family. “That was the wonderful thing about the whole Gabe story,” said Jana. “We did it in the African way, with those who’d been involved in his life. There’s a strong connection, and I felt that was a good example—a different way of doing international adoption.”

Although the Jenkins have returned to the United States for several years at least, they hoped to interest some Rwandan diaspora families in the US Great Lakes region to consider adopting—internationally, but within their own culture. Back in Kigali families among the Christ’s Church congregation were fostering two new infants—at first just the church’s new senior pastor, another ex-pat couple from the missionary organization the Jenkins served, ROC, but later a Rwandan family as well.

“I’m not yet ready to give up on Rwandans adopting,” said Jenkins, who noted that she had witnessed a rise in local adoptions in Uganda and Kenya in recent years and cited the great changes in US attitudes toward adoption over the last century. In time, she suggested, Rwanda will be a leader among other countries in caring for its own children. But, she added, “It’s going to be a slow journey. That’s why I think there’s still a place for intercountry adoption as a last resort.” Gabriel’s case, at this early point, might not have leant itself to the ideal solution of finding
willing and qualified—and sufficiently wealthy—Rwandan parents, but to Jana it still demonstrated an intermediate way forward: involving the local community in addressing the problem firsthand and in envisioning different solutions. “I wish I could say there are all these Rwandan families lining up left and right that want to do this,” she said, “but these are just the first, initial steps.”

Saddleback’s Munyemana conveyed the same message about Rwanda’s slow shift to care for—and keep—their vulnerable children at home. “We are not yet there,” he told me, “but we may definitely get there.”

CHAPTER 8

Going Home

I
n August 2005, the day after she gave birth, a South Korean hairdresser in her midthirties named Hyoung-Suk Choi picked up the phone to ask for her baby back. Choi, still a young-looking woman at thirty-nine, with dimpled cheeks and wearing tortoiseshell glasses when I spoke to her online through an interpreter, had found out she was pregnant shortly after she had broken up with her boyfriend of many years. Her brother pressured her intensely to abort the pregnancy, to spare their parents shame. A gynecologist she visited told her that if she gave the child up for adoption, the birth fees would be covered and Choi would receive $500. She kept working until she was in her last trimester, but then, when her pregnancy could no longer be concealed, Choi quit her job at the salon to avoid talk that she, an unmarried woman, was about to have a child.

For single, pregnant women living in South Korea, life is a lot like it was in the United States during the Baby Scoop Era, when millions of women were sent to maternity homes to give birth to their children in secret and relinquish them for adoption. Korean single women who give birth and keep their babies are often disowned by their families and shunned by society. According to a survey conducted in 2009, unwed mothers were the second-most stigmatized group in the entire country, second only to gays and lesbians. Just as in the Baby Scoop Era, the availability of secretive adoptions is seen as a way for women to start anew and leave their mistakes behind. Even the infrastructure is the same, with ubiquitous maternity homes throughout South Korea, maintained by
domestic and international adoption agencies and referred to by some mothers as “baby farms.”

After Choi quit her job she went to a counseling session offered by an adoption agency in Seoul and was advised to go to a maternity home in the country, Ae Ran Won. She moved there in June 2005 and lived among twenty other women, traveling in groups of five or six to the doctors’ office for prenatal checkups. Most, like Choi, were in their late twenties or older—not the teen mothers who had filled the homes in years past and who still represented the public’s idea of unwed moms. Twice a month the women fielded visits from representatives from some of the four adoption agencies licensed to work in South Korea. The agency representatives would explain the adoption process, urging the residents to see adoption as a chance for their children to be well educated and emphasizing the grim prospects facing a single-mother family: the mothers would be discriminated against by family, neighbors, customers, and even strangers; their children might be segregated away from the rest of their class at school, with some teachers not giving them snacks and even putting them in a separate room; and other parents likely wouldn’t allow their kids to play with “illegitimate” children. Further, when the children reached adulthood, employers would be less likely to hire candidates whose mothers hadn’t been married and the parents of anyone the children might seek to marry would likely forbid the match. The sense of public condemnation of anything associated with unwed motherhood is such that, in 2009, a
New York Times
article noted that “Koreans often describe things as outrageous by comparing them to ‘an unmarried woman seeking an excuse to give birth.’”

It was a powerful message for women who wanted to parent their children themselves: that to keep their baby would only cause the child real and lasting harm. What that left for many, then, was a secondary decision: between their child being adopted domestically or going overseas. Many women at Ae Ran Won who met with adoption agency representatives came to think of international adoption as the “open adoption” option, through which they might receive updates and keep in contact with their child. Although that sort of contact was far from guaranteed, international adoption at least held out more hope of one day hearing from their children than did domestic placement through so-called “secret adoptions” within South Korea. Given the cultural stigma surrounding children born out of wedlock, adoptive parents in South Korea sometimes go to elaborate lengths to conceal the fact that their child is not biologically their own—faking a pregnancy to coincide with the completion of their adoption or
planning a strategic cross-country move to present themselves to new neighbors as an already intact family. What’s more, because in South Korea’s independent birth registration system children are sometimes not registered until several weeks after a child is born (rather than being automatically registered at the hospital), most adoptive parents will document their adopted children as though they had given birth to them instead.

In addition to the agency visits, groups of adoptees periodically would come to the home as part of an adult adoptee “homeland tour,” organized by a US or Western adoption agency, to share their own experience of being adopted. As those visits were translated by agency staff, said Choi, all the adoptees seemed to have been placed with wonderful families, with doctor fathers and teacher mothers, to have grown up happy and have gone to college.

“It was basically a message,” said Choi, “that if you send your child for adoption, they’re going to be sent to a wealthy family and raised well.” The unspoken part of the message was an invitation for the women to compare what they could offer against the resources and advantages of a rich Western family. The messaging paid off. Although Choi said many women enter maternity homes hoping to raise their children, by the time they give birth only a small percentage actually do.

After Choi told her counselor at the home that she was considering adoption, in short order representatives from three adoption agencies visited her. During the half-hour meetings she had with each, all three agencies pressured her to sign a preliminary consent form, authorizing the adoption of her future child. Two of the agency counselors admitted that if she sent her child for international adoption, she would only see him, if at all, after he became an adult, but the third promised to find a family who would keep her involved. She chose that agency, and they gave her the adoption forms, requesting biographical information about her and the father. When she hesitated to sign it and authorize the adoption ahead of time, they urged her to at least fill it out so she wouldn’t be bothered with details after birth. Choi completed the form, and the agency representative left. That thirty-minute talk was all the counseling she would ever receive.

TODAY NEARLY 70 PERCENT
of unwed mothers who give birth in South Korea—approximately six to ten thousand women per year—relinquish their children for adoption. In 2011, children of unwed mothers accounted for 88 percent of international adoptions from South Korea and
almost 94 percent of official domestic adoptions within the country.
*
Only 8 percent of South Korean adopted children did
not
come from single mothers that year.