The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (28 page)

“There are times that I don’t take [my own children] outside the hospital gate because they are thrown with rocks [sic] and I often get yelled at and screamed at and pulled and pushed and pinched,” Bowers told Harding. “It’s normal for them, they see us as threatening, because here we come in from America, and you know the media has projected America as the saving place, heaven on earth.”

In fact, Bowers was coming from South Africa’s Afrikaans community, where she was raised before marrying Harry in 1991. And at times it seemed like her Afrikaner roots were showing in some of her assessments of the people CWA served, whom she described as having “low understanding, low education, and low intellect,” with some street children “as wild as a little animal” and many mothers allegedly detached from their children: not naming babies immediately after birth or nursing them at arm’s length as a self-defense mechanism against high infant mortality. “There’s not this snuggly, motherly comforting,” she said to me. “That’s a taught behavior.” Although the last may be a cultural custom, Bowers extrapolated from it a larger picture of poor mothers’ lack of attachment to their children. “Survival is in a very different place [here]. I don’t think we can in a first world environment understand the concept of survival in this environment because it’s so extreme,” she continued to me, noting that two women had offered her their children on the street just the day before. “A part of me feels, how is it possible that women can conceive so
easily here, when there’s such a fertility problem in the US? What I really sense [in Ethiopia] is the lack of understanding the value of children.”

By comparison, Bowers finds the adoptive parents who come “such special people. They are tender and soft and understanding, and they come here and it’s almost as though the seed was planted and they come and walk in the land and it gets roots. They get the connection of what they’re doing and that it has eternal value.”

In the five years Bowers worked in Sodo, CCC and CWA had begun a wealth of community outreach programs, from feeding programs administered through local evangelical churches, which give food aid to people who attend a worship service, to medical work, to sponsoring a couple of promising young evangelists at a local Bible college to spread the word about CCC’s approach to child care.

“Oh, and by the way, there’s adoption,” joked Bowers, as she gave me a tour of CWA’s temporary Sodo orphanage, a cramped but clean rental facility set among houses on a dirt road but protected by strong concrete walls topped with shattered glass bottles. In rooms divided by age, young women dressed in blue uniforms sat with groups of infants, surrounded by reminders of US supporters: bins stacked high with donated toys, toiletries, and clothes, and a soccer ball sent by one adoptive family, meticulously covered in handwritten scripture verses.

The home housed approximately thirty children, ranging from a few weeks to five years old, all bound for adoption, mostly to the Untied States. But not just then. When I visited in 2011 the SNNPR had been under an administrative freeze on adoption-intake documentation—the process that allows children to be listed as available for adoption—for seven months while the government conducted investigations of all orphanages in the area. Later that year the government shut down a number of orphanages in the region that were said to exist for the purpose of adoption alone—not serving children who would stay in the country—as part of its efforts to regain control of the runaway adoption boom. Although CCC’s orphanages were not directly affected, the government’s newly assertive role had touched many aspects of life. As I arrived, Bowers told me, Sodo’s most local level of bureaucracy, the
kebele,
had just undergone a major turnover “as a result of the tensions and stresses around adoption.”

But still, she stressed, adoption wasn’t what the organization was about. “Adoption has never been the real motivation for CCC. It has always been community development and care.” After the orphanage tour she fed me and my companions a snack of tea and pancakes made from a
high-nutrient grain mixture, mitten, which CCC staff produce to feed the children and generate outside income. She said she and other CWA personnel took the media accusations about “child harvesting” deeply to heart for being so misrepresentative of their work.

Bowers claimed that she had never seen the video of Michelle Gardner recruiting children, and that Gardner wasn’t CWA staff anyway. There was trafficking among other agencies, Bowers said, though she maintained that her Ethiopian colleagues in CCC deliberately shielded her from knowing too much. “We heard the vehicles go and bring children at night. The staff are so careful with me. . . . I would ask them, is that vehicle doing the right thing, and they would say, ‘There are so many children’ and draw my attention to something else.” Bowers believed her staff downplayed the trafficking out of safety concerns or embarrassment about fellow Ethiopians’ choices. But she also sympathized with other agencies’ behavior. “We know there were social workers from other agencies who went out into the community and asked if there were children who were orphans. And the government saw that as child harvesting. At the time it was not intended like that. When adoption just boomed, and it became this almost lucrative thing, everyone, all potential social workers, were just absorbed into orphanages,” she said. “The social workers hear these numbers: three million, six million, four, five million. Everybody is confused: is this true? Where are these children?”

The whole “adoption thing,” she imagines, caught Ethiopia off guard, becoming an embarrassment when people approached it as a way to make money. But the corruption Bowers acknowledged was strictly on the local level—not from the foreign agencies bringing the business to town, but local government officials pressuring her for kickbacks in return for inspecting her orphanages.

Whatever the cause, some adoptions have gone wrong. Biological family members of the children have shown up at the gates of CWA’s orphanages crying, Bowers said, upset because they haven’t received word from the children who were sent to the United States and looking for “the next letter, photo, birr” (Ethiopian currency). CWA responded by asking adoptive families to stop traveling to the villages their children came from because of the confusion it caused among parents, who gained stature among neighbors from a visit or gifts bestowed by adoptive parents. The impact of those gifts—ranging from token presents to new roofs or money—Bowers said, led other families to place their children for adoption as well, creating a minifad among families who were unaware of adoption’s permanence, as was the case when three mothers from the
same small community showed up at a CCC orphanage at once, all seeking to relinquish together.

But in 2011 Bowers was focused on moving forward. From her desk at CCC’s cramped office, she could see over the compound’s walls and shattered glass to the top of a nearby hillside, where CCC and CWA were building a new multipurpose, six thousand–square meter compound, Wolaita Village. Once finished, it would house all of CCC’s programs and could potentially separate funding for orphanage work from adoption revenue. “When I sat down here, I felt like Moses, because there is the Promised Land,” Bowers said, gazing up at the future construction site, which overlooks all of Sodo. At Wolaita Village a large children’s home would be surrounded by money-making ventures: a guest home for adoptive parents or short-term missionaries, a multipurpose conference facility, a factory making mitten, a café serving mitten pancakes and other mitten goods, and a central plaza with a well where community members could wait to be ministered to by CCC staff, just as Jesus ministered to the woman at the well. There would also be a newly constructed manager’s home for the Bowers to live in, as they were shortly facing a move off hospital grounds.

But two years after the child harvesting scandal the future of Ethiopian adoption was uncertain. “We don’t know the face of adoption. . . . If the support or funding dries up, what then?” she wondered to me.

By late 2011 it was no longer her concern. Bowers and her husband moved to Germany to work as dorm parents in a Christian boarding school. By the time they had to vacate their mission hospital quarters to make room for more doctors, their manager’s house had not yet been built, and the plans for Wolaita Village remained stalled.

THE LEMMAS
and the Bradshaws were far from the only ones who experienced the ugly side of Ethiopian adoptions. Adoptive parents in the United States registered complaints with the US government and in the media that, when their children learned enough English to communicate with them, they told their adoptive parents that the birth parents whom adoption agencies had said were dead were actually alive, that there were more siblings than the agency had claimed, that mothers said to have conceived from stranger rapes were in fact married to their children’s fathers.

Further, mothers in Ethiopia began coming to orphanages or government offices to seek news about their children. Adoptive parents shared
stories on online forums about visiting the villages their children were from—sometimes hours away from the orphanages that had helped shepherd their adoptions, indicating that orphanage staff with access to vehicles had likely sought out the families, rather than the reverse. There, the adoptive parents were greeted by numerous families whose children had been adopted, families who were desperate to get word about how the children were doing. Some adoptive parents sought more information about how their children had actually been relinquished, including one woman who found her child’s birth family by driving into their town and literally calling out their name. When they found birth families, they often learned that the stories agencies had provided didn’t match up with what their children’s birth families told them. “It feels terrible,” one adoptive mother told me. “Like you stepped on something solid and it turned to quicksand.” Another explained, “When you go to adopt, the last thing you imagine is going into some developing country and stealing someone’s child.”

In videos that agencies supplied to adoptive parents, birthmothers were filmed proudly handing over children they had raised nearly to adolescence, smiling at the camera in a way that made US adopters suspicious that the mothers didn’t know what they were doing. One prospective adoptive mother received such a video from her adoption agency, and when she hired a translator to interpret the Amharic conversation the agency had with the mothers of two unrelated children she wanted to adopt, the translator implored the woman not to proceed. “She said ‘Please, I beg you, do not go forward with this adoption. The mothers do not understand anything.’” In the video one of the mothers was asked whether she understood what adoption was. She replied no, and the footage stopped. When it came back on, the mother said yes, she understood, and could they excuse her to return to her baking? The US mother withdrew from the adoption but soon after learned that the children were given to another US family instead.

Some adoptive parents who connected with their children’s birth family, either to ensure that their adoptions were ethical or so their children retained ties to their homeland and kin, ended up being approached by those families to adopt another child. Such was the case for one family who adopted two biological siblings from the country under what they came to learn were unethical circumstances. Several years later the children’s Ethiopian father offered the adoptive parents his two remaining children, placing the US family in the fraught position of either proceeding with an adoption they suspected would be unethical and that they
knew was not a case of saving orphans, or letting the children be adopted to another family and thereby miss this second chance to grow up with their US brother and sister.

In a way this no-win situation is the predictable result of the confused idea of the orphan crisis that UNICEF’s Susan Bissell described: a complex and persistent development and poverty crisis has been transformed into a crisis solely about the poor’s vulnerable or orphaned children. This created a system on both the US and Ethiopian sides that treats adoption as the go-to solution for family crises. Although the Christian movement pledges to bring the “end of orphans in the world,” making adoption the answer seems to ensure that the root causes that create “orphans” will go unchanged and that the poor—or at least their children—will always be with us, as families mired in a cycle of devastating poverty, and in the absence of a working child welfare system, continue to relinquish children they still have inadequate means to provide for.

On adoptees’ paperwork birth parents were sometimes simultaneously declared dead and unknown—a logical gap that usually went unchallenged as the papers wound their way through Ethiopia’s elaborate infrastructure for processing adoptions. This system involved various levels of Ethiopian government required to sign off on different aspects of each case, including federal and regional branches of the Ministry of Women, Children and Youth Affairs (MOWA), the Ministry of Justice, and a Charities and Societies Agency that oversees accreditation for all NGOs, including adoption agencies. “You couldn’t design it in a more complicated way if you tried,” said Doug Webb, then-chief of section for Adolescent Development, Protection, and HIV/AIDS at UNICEF Ethiopia. But instead of the complex process making the system clearer, in some ways it has compounded the problem, creating new ways for corruption to flourish and fraudulent claims to be rubber stamped and made official long before they ever reach federal courts. “A lot of the arrangements and paperwork that makes things appear differently than they are happens at the local level, out there in the bush with brokers, agents, officials, and policemen,” said Webb. “Once the paperwork reaches the federal level, in some cases the opportunity for abuse may have already been taken.”

Judge Rahila Abbas, Ethiopia’s federal judge in charge of all the country’s adoption cases, told Peter Heinlein of
Voice of America
that the court has limited power to tackle corruption when presented with falsified documents that were certified at an earlier stage of the process, leaving the higher branches of government impotent to challenge documents they suspect to be false.