The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (37 page)

There was a wide-ranging assignment of blame. Facilitators chided parents for not being patient enough with war-traumatized children. Parents blamed facilitators for abandoning them with problems beyond what was disclosed. Anglin suggested a further failure by home study agencies for not educating families, and she has publicly noted that Acres of Hope did not conduct the home study for the Schatzes, the California family that killed their Liberian daughter. At a 2012 panel on disrupted adoptions Dr. Jon Bergeron of Hope for Orphans excused parents who dissolved their adoptions with a dehumanizing portrait of the children they had taken in. Sharing an anecdote about his family’s adopted dog, Bergeron said that a house break-in had traumatized the dog, which then became dangerous as a result of the trauma. “We couldn’t just step back and try harder and do more to work with him. We had to make the hard decision,” he told the audience, referencing their eventual decision to give up the dog, “and that’s where these families are at.”

Lydia Sherman, of Liberia’s Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, had little patience for arguments like these. “You’re adopting a child from a third-world country that went through fourteen years of civil war. What exactly do you think you’re adopting? The whole idea of sending them to the United States is because the US is more advanced and has all the different treatments there.
You’re
supposed to help them,” she told me.

Cheryl Carter-Shotts, whose adoption agency has had no disrupted adoptions from Liberia, said parents need constant support and reminders—that their child was coming from a war zone and would need a full year to recover from every year they were in danger, went hungry, or witnessed violence. But instead of encountering this patience, many, perhaps even most of the older, traumatized children coming from Liberia went into families in which attachment and love were defined as immediate and unqualified obedience. It was a mismatch of the needs of children and the capabilities of adoptive parents on a nearly epic scale, with many Liberian adoptees going to exactly the wrong sorts of families.

Even Patty Anglin admitted the pairings were sometimes off. “In adoptions, even in America with foster care or anywhere in the world, you are going to have a certain percentage of adoptive families that just probably shouldn’t have adopted to begin with,” she told me. “And [yet] they make it through the system—they don’t have any criminal record, they’re well intended. Many of the families were—and I want to be careful in saying this because I myself am a Christian—but those far-right wingers oftentimes, are more narrow in their tolerance level and understanding. And they’re probably less prepared, because they live in a more protective environment.”

Stories began to pile up of children being returned to Liberia. “You heard about the Tennessee case that returned the child to Russia?” Edward Winant, former vice consul in charge of adoptions at the US Embassy in Monrovia, asked me. He was referencing the adoptive mother in Tennessee who had sent her seven-year-old Russian son back to Moscow in 2010, with a note pinned to his coat charging that he was violent and mentally unstable. “We’ve had at least three similar cases, where the parents took the child, for some reason they couldn’t handle them, and sent them back.” In one case, Winant said, a Liberian girl between seven and ten was found wandering the Brussels airport with $200 in her pocket.

The disruption rates were probably similar to those for neighboring Sierra Leone, Winant thought—another country recovering from civil war, where some reports found that overwhelming majorities of children surveyed had witnessed someone being killed or injured or had seen a dead body—but the disruptions were happening at a much higher volume with Liberian kids.

The Department of State announced that in 2008 the Liberian government began to carefully review all Liberian adoptions after the country’s government had learned about the growing number of adoptive families who had disrupted or dissolved their adoptions, ending their relationship with the child. Bishop Emmanuel Jones, a Liberian evangelist who runs an orphanage and a home for street children, has taken in at least four children adopted through ACFI who were later returned to Liberia, and he knows of five others who were sent back. Some families sent him children—mostly boys—to “get reorientation” after they displayed sexual behavior; girls were returned because of perceived resistance to authority, said Jones, because “they don’t want to submit.” Some of the families wanted Jones to counsel the kids and return them to the United States. “But some of [the families] don’t even know how to help,” said Jones, “so in their frustration, they just say, okay, we’ll send you back to Africa.”

Among the boys playing in the walled-in compound outside Jones’s Monrovia office when we met in 2011 was one who had been sent back nearly two years earlier. Jones still gets requests to help parents repatriate their children. Other children who are “rehomed” simply drop off the map, as little adequate tracking of disrupted adoptions exists. General statistics for the United States hold that between 6 and 11 percent of all adoptions are disrupted, with the rate of failure climbing to nearly 25 percent for children adopted as adolescents. Sometimes it’s because of serious issues of family safety—problems with children behaving sexually or violently—and sometimes, several adoption workers told me, it’s for much more benign frustrations: grinding teeth, repetitive behaviors, or even irksome medical problems like ringworm. “There’s no protocol when a disruption happens,” said Maureen Flatley, an adoption oversight expert who has lobbied for adoption reform legislation. “There’s almost no knowledge of where these kids go when they leave the families that originally adopted them.”

In 2011 I learned the answer for one, an eighteen-year-old young man named Saah Fayiah who had been adopted from Liberia through WACSN in 2007 to a US couple in Pennsylvania. As an infant during the early years of the civil war, Fayiah had been shot in the head while his mother held him. His mother died, but Fayiah lived with the bullet embedded in his skull for years—until his adoptive parents had it removed in the United States. The injury left Fayiah with some atrophied muscles on one side of his body and undetermined cognitive and emotional wounds. Further, at some point during his first year of adoption he was accused of making a violent threat, though the details are unclear and Fayiah denied it. Within a year after his adoption Fayiah was returned to Liberia—though his sense of the timeline is shaky, and his adoptive family, who requested not to be named, said that Fayiah’s brain injury and emotional issues had left him with an impaired memory.

Since the quiet disruption of his adoption, Fayiah, now a thin young man easily overwhelmed with grief, has lived with other impoverished young men, former employees cast off from WACSN when the adoption business closed, in an unfinished building miles outside Monrovia. Fayiah receives no financial support from either his adoptive or biological families, is unable to afford school fees, and faces the additional stigma of having returned to Liberia from the United States without any money or advantages to show for it. People who know his story think he squandered his opportunity to prosper in the States and mockingly call him, “American man, American Fayiah.”

“I have people who used to tell me I had a green card,” Fayiah told me in the back room of a makeshift café off Monrovia’s Old Road, a crowded strip of shanties and markets, “but I haven’t seen it. I’m a citizen of America, but I have to be back now in Liberia.” He eagerly showed me an outdated US passport that he carries around everywhere and asked whether I could help him find a US sponsor. “I don’t really understand what I did in America that I had to be sent back,” he said.

Although Heather Cannon-Winkelman, a founding WACSN board member who resigned from the agency over disagreements about its adoption practices, has tried many times since 2009 to help Fayiah reestablish his claim to US citizenship, she has been repeatedly told that the adoptive family is still responsible for him—or at least that they had been until he turned eighteen—and that there’s little that US or Liberian government bodies can do. In 2012, despairing of ever getting him support from US officials, and suspecting that his adoption had never been finalized in the United States, Cannon-Winkelman personally sponsored him and several other children to go to school full time in Liberia.

The number of Liberian children whose citizenship was in question after their adoptions were disrupted has led some people familiar with the stories to suspect that adoptive parents intentionally failed to complete the adoptions so as to make disruption easier if it became necessary, as parents who disrupt and send their children into foster care can be liable for child support. In 2012 Johanna, the adoptive mother who had watched the Liberian adoption phenomenon grow among
Above Rubies
families, received an e-mail from a fundamentalist homeschooling family that at one time had had twelve children, including three adopted from Liberia. By the time they contacted Johanna, who lives a few hours away in New York, they were down to ten. The family, so conservative that the women wore head coverings, had already “rehomed” their other two Liberian adoptees—one to a family who had previously failed their home study when they had sought to adopt themselves—and they explained on a family blog that they believed God had used them to bring the children to the families He ultimately intended them to have. Now the family was threatening to send the last child, a fifteen-year-old boy diagnosed with PTSD with psychosis whom they had adopted four years earlier from Daniel Hoover Orphanage, back to Liberia. They cited his nonviolent but emotional outbursts, which were almost certainly a result of the trauma he endured during Liberia’s civil war, during which he saw people get killed and was enlisted to clean up the bodies when fighting broke out at the orphanage. They were convinced that this behavior—yelling and punching
walls, threatening to harm himself—indicated he might become a sexual predator and harm their biological daughters. “Right now our options are your family, trying to turn him over to the foster care system, or returning him to Liberia,” the family wrote to Johanna. The boy, like so many other Liberian adoptees, had been punished by having food withheld or being put outside overnight, and the family had additionally tampered with his psychiatric medications in an attempt to control his outbursts.

“They were never prepared to bring these children home. They’re not bad people, but what they’ve done is extremely wrong,” said Lisa Bates, another Ohio Christian adoptive mother who had cared for the boy temporarily before he went to Johanna’s family. “They did it out of ignorance [and a desire] to be seen doing good.” When he came to Bates’s house, the teen had only a third-grade education and was so underweight that he gained twenty pounds in two weeks.

The family told Johanna that they had knowingly never gotten around to re-adopting him in the United States, meaning their son wasn’t a US citizen. “He said he felt fear every day he was in that home, waiting every day to be thrown out,” said Johanna. An attorney they spoke to in New York about handling the custody change as they prepared to adopt him had apparently worked on an almost identical case, for another Liberian child, and believed that a number of families had intentionally failed to complete adoptions to leave themselves a legal loophole.

Bates and Johanna agreed. “If he’s not a US citizen and he just disappears, what can [the authorities] do to the family?” Bates asked. “Somebody was thinking about this. Why else would so many of these people not re-adopt?”

It doesn’t seem out of the question, given the open conversation around disruption in the
Above Rubies
community. At one point the Liberian adoption discussion forums frequented by families like the one that adopted Johanna’s new son were abuzz with adoptive parents seeking to find other homes for their children, and foster care postings featured new Liberian kids every few months. Families called for a suspension of judgment for parents undergoing disruption, which was beginning to seem like just another part of the process. “Let’s be a community of support for ALL adoptions,” wrote one, “in any aspect of their journey.”

WHEN KATE AND ROGER
Thompson learned that Isaiah had been sent back to Liberia, they frantically called relatives and government officials. In desperation Roger, a software engineer who created the popular
security program Link Scanner, posted a note on an adoptive parents’ forum, and within hours a woman who had adopted Isaiah’s cousin got in touch to say that her mother, a missionary nurse, had sworn she had seen Isaiah in Monrovia. Her mother knew Isaiah’s uncle and put them in touch. “We didn’t really want to be bothered,” said Roger, a quiet man in his sixties with a dry, patient wit. “But when they send a kid back to Liberia, in my mind that was a death sentence. I didn’t want to get involved, but I couldn’t stand by.”

Through Isaiah’s uncle, the Thompsons were able to track him down in River Cess and bring him back to Monrovia, where he stayed until his paperwork could be arranged. Sam Allison began calling Isaiah there, telling him to demand that the Thompsons fly him back to Tennessee. To the Thompsons he offered to return Isaiah’s passport only if Isaiah was sent back to them. The Thompsons turned to ACFI and later Acres of Hope to intervene and said that only after the facilitators threatened to report the Allisons did they agree to relinquish custody.

Acres of Hope director Patty Anglin, whom Isaiah visited while waiting to return to the United States, defends the Allisons. “No one was wrong in that situation. They just felt that for their particular family, it was not going to work out and was not appropriate,” she said, adding that Engedi’s adoption, conducted through Acres of Hope, has been a tremendous success. “I think Sam knew that it was a very dangerous thing he was doing,” said Isaiah. “He said, ‘I could get in very big trouble for this. The Thompsons are going crazy about you and trying to adopt you, and I’m not going to let that happen.’” When it became clear that Isaiah would go to the Thompsons, Sam warned him not to answer their questions.