The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (46 page)

“In some countries there is acceptance of adoption, but in Rwanda we think only God can know the future,” he concluded, arguing that Rwandans are afraid of not knowing whether their children are okay after they leave the country. “There are some people coming and saying, ‘the Rwandese are stupid because they don’t want the good life for their children.’ But people have to think twice. I may be in a miserable situation today and not able to educate my children, but maybe tomorrow can be better. It’s easy to say, okay, you want the child, take the child. But maybe my children will not forgive me. I think it is better to say I’ll keep my children.”

This cultural skepticism of international adoption has required prospective adoptive parents to learn to accommodate themselves to Rwanda instead of the other way around. In 2008 Jennifer Jukanovich, an adoptive mother of two in Seattle and a six-year board member for the Christian adoption movement group Children’s HopeChest, embarked on an adoption from Rwanda. As she was leaving an appointment with MIGEPROF, a young law student standing outside the ministry offices stopped her and asked to see her paperwork, explaining that she wanted to ensure that Rwandan children were going to good homes. Jukanovich didn’t share her paperwork, but the demand, hard to imagine taking place in a country like Ethiopia, impressed upon her that things worked differently in Rwanda. Many who have been through Rwanda’s adoption system have also encountered the government’s determination not to let the country develop a baby business that trades in the offspring of the nation’s poor. “When I first moved there, it drove me crazy,” said Jukanovich, who has since spent time in Rwanda working on business development. “But now I really do understand that they’re trying to protect you and trying to protect their country, making sure there’s no corruption. It’s a struggle, but Rwandans don’t want to become an Ethiopia. They want to do things right.”

Many others in the small community involved with Rwandan adoptions agreed. “I know that the previous minister of gender went to Ethiopia and it just turned her against international adoption,” Jana Jenkins told me. She noted the existence of bad actors—“a lot of hokey groups”—among the many adoption agencies working in Ethiopia. By comparison she didn’t think Rwanda’s “proactive government” allowed the same room for bad behavior. “It’s easier to do your own thing in a country that’s loosey-goosey and doesn’t know what they’re doing.
There’s a vacuum. But there’s definitely a direction that Rwanda’s going and it’s moving pretty fast, and if you come, you just jump on board and see what you can do.”

Those who have made it through the process also often admire the country’s refusal to conduct easy adoptions. “At times it’s hard to explain to waiting families,” said adoption facilitator Tina Harriman. “They see the statistics of how many millions of orphans are in the world and they want to help, and then you have to wait for over a year to find a child that’s available. But it’s because [Rwanda is] very selective and wants to ensure that everything’s done very appropriately.”

Jaya Holliman is a Vermont mother of two who adopted from Rwanda in 2009. She and her husband decided to adopt after losing their newborn son in 2006 due to a uterine rupture during labor that also left Holliman infertile. After grieving, Holliman approached an agency that was then starting a pilot program in Rwanda. At the time the number of US parents who adopted Rwandan infants each year could be counted on one hand. Holliman induced lactation so she could breastfeed the child she hoped to adopt, and on her agency’s recommendation, went to Rwanda to try to shepherd her paperwork through. But the government, suspecting her of lying about her son’s death because of the fact that she was lactating and also, she later learned, because they didn’t approve of the agency and lawyer she was using, denied her application. “They refused to work with agencies—they flat out refused, which I hadn’t been aware of when I signed up,” said Holliman.

On a tip from a friend who had successfully adopted from Rwanda previously, Holliman fired the agency, which had misled her about their standing with the government, and applied again on her own, providing documentation about her son’s death and her decision to induce lactation. Perhaps more importantly, however, she assured the government that she was now working alone. She was rewarded with a second chance and shortly adopted an infant boy she and her husband named Pacifique. The intensity of the personal scrutiny each case received remained with her. “They were very wary of places like Ethiopia. They were so adamant about the integrity of each case to the point where, when they thought I was lying, they didn’t even open my file,” she said.

“The impression I got in Rwanda is that they literally take each case on face value,” agreed Megan Biehl, a California mother who adopted in 2008 and the friend who advised Holliman on reapplying without an agency. Biehl, who also adopted following the death of one of her biological children, had been advised by contacts in Rwanda that MIGEPROF
judged adoption applications on an extremely personal basis—whether the ministry “felt that your story was compelling enough that you deserve to have one of their children”—and that they were fiercely opposed to working with agencies. “The minister told me: do this yourself. We will not work with agencies. You do it yourself and you show me why you want to be a parent for a child from Rwanda, and I will look at your paperwork.”

While Biehl and her husband were in the middle of their adoption application, in 2008, they met with then-MIGEPROF head Dr. Jeanne d’Arc Mujawamariya. The minister, Biehl recalled, held up a book about international adoption that an adoption facilitator working for a US agency had given to her, “kind of shook it a bit, and said, ‘We do not sell our babies.’”

“I think that [book] infuriated MIGEPROF. It was not a route that she appreciated—this kind of backdoor route of trying to adopt,” Biehl said. She asked the couple to be advocates, spreading the word when they got home that Rwanda doesn’t “‘want any money for our babies.’” “Rwanda should be honored for trying to hold strong to their roots,” Biehl reflected, “and not letting the machine get to it.”

The difference was so striking that when both Biehl and Holliman traveled through Ethiopia to finish paperwork at Addis Ababa’s larger US embassy, the hostility they encountered from Ethiopians who assumed they were adopting Ethiopian children shocked them. Rwanda’s smaller system had largely insulated it from that kind of popular backlash.

Rwanda’s concerns about allowing agencies access to its process are such that, according to Ngabonziza, MIGEPROF even second-guessed its decision to invite agency representatives to its planning discussions for the country’s new adoption law. “One of the mistakes we made as we were preparing the instruments was we invited an adoption agency from the states to help out with the definitions [of best practices in intercountry adoption],” Ngabonziza recalled. “The staff that were sent here did a good job and had good tools that we’ll review, but the way they outlined those tools could probably make the United States privileged in adopting from Rwanda above other countries, in terms of what we require from adoptive parents, the criteria they should meet, the support they should have processing the application—things that are not universal.” Were they to do it over again, he said, he would have instead requested policy-drafting help from a more neutral body, like the Hague bureau, rather than representatives from any particular country, “especially not the one that has the majority of applications to adopt from Rwanda. It’s a conflict of interest.”

Harriman, who worked in intercountry adoptions herself, echoed some of Ngabonziza’s worries. “What I have loved about Rwandan adoptions from day one is the integrity with which the government works. I don’t know of anything that could slide through in terms of unethical practices. I remember when they were talking about moving towards the Hague convention, I kind of chuckled, thinking, they are so there already!”

But, she continued, “When they open up under the Hague, I fear that you’re going to get all the Hague-accredited agencies pouring in and inundating the system even more, with even more people seeking adoption, when even now there’s a shortage of children able to be referred. I don’t know how that’s going to look when they really open back up and how they’re going to maintain the supply and demand. I’m glad that Rwanda is doing all they can to ensure the protection of their children, but on the other hand, part of me feels like they already were.”

CHRISTIANS INVOLVED
in adoption and orphan-care work in Rwanda also seem to have taken a different approach from the rest of the movement. And interestingly, that might be thanks in part to Saddleback’s evolving pattern of involvement on the world stage.

Ten years into the P.E.A.C.E. Plan, Saddleback leaders say they have come to see their global work differently than they used to. As Warren cheerfully admitted, in offering to help other churches replicate Saddleback’s model, “We’ve learned a thousand ways to
not
do missions, to not help the poor, to not help the sick, to not help orphans.” But along the way, he said, they came upon a few dozen things that do work “unbelievably well.” In so doing it seems that Saddleback Church, one of the earliest leaders of the adoption movement, has rediscovered some of the “best practices” that traditional development organizations like UNICEF hold to.

This shift is perhaps best exemplified in the advocacy of Saddleback’s Orphan Care ministry director, Styffe, an effusively friendly woman who laughs and cries easily and peppers her public speaking with self-deprecating jokes (“I’m more blonde than I pay to be,” she riffed at the Christian Alliance Summit). Styffe is a nurse by background who had cared for HIV-positive children in California before Saddleback became involved in global HIV/AIDS work. Also a mother of seven, including three Rwandan children, Styffe arguably planted the seed for Saddleback’s development work, showing Kay Warren the article on African HIV/AIDS
orphans that famously gave the pastor’s wife a newfound sympathy for victims of the disease.

Beneath Styffe’s warm demeanor—she invites all new acquaintances to consider her a close, personal friend—the Orange County mother has developed a depth of field experience beyond that of many of her peers in the evangelical adoption community. Too often, she explains, well-intentioned mission groups will launch themselves into a local community in a developing country, determined to complete a simple, concrete plan; instead, they end up dominating the process without taking local opinions, talents, or labor into account. She urged volunteers at the Christian Alliance Summit not to bring money—or at least not at first—and not to perform projects that local people and local churches can do for themselves. Rather, she said, they should tap local human resources and support local goals. Saddleback, for example, had learned to support local churches in Rwanda in completing whatever project was most important for their community—in one instance, building a public soccer field—so that those churches reaped the credit, not the international volunteers.

This strategy certainly reflected the P.E.A.C.E. Plan’s principles and evangelizing aims—local citizens happy about the soccer field were more likely to join the churches that built it—but also embodied broader principles from the development community, such as replacing drop-in charity with self-sustaining local leadership. And after the soccer fields are built, Styffe said, churches can begin to tackle other challenges, like encouraging their flocks to see the orphans in their community as a problem that they themselves must address. “The way we measure our success,” Styffe said, “is who is the hero [when the NGO leaves], and it’s the local church.” It was a lesson she meant for the adoption community as well: “If the hope of the world is the American church adopting,” she added at Saddleback, “then we will never end the orphan crisis. But if the hope of the world is adoption in the local church, then we’ll do everything to mobilize every believer and some will adopt.” It’s a slower process, she said, but one that will last.

Following this plan, she said, when American Christians go abroad to serve, “they [should not] go play in an orphanage. Or if they go play with kids in an orphanage, they’ll take people from the local church, so when they leave, the local church is still there, still engaged.”

Styffe’s remarks invoked the charges brought against “AIDS orphan tourism” in the 2010 report by the Human Sciences Research Council. This report warned that Westerners mixing exotic vacations with volunteer work in orphanages—an apt description of many short-term
mission programs—were doing more harm than good. Not only did “voluntourism” trips chip away at the local economy by preempting possible jobs—volunteers actually paying to do low-skilled work that locals could instead perform for a wage; they also risked hurting children in orphanages whose stability and development were disturbed by a rotating cast of visitors forming intense but short-lived bonds that inevitably were broken at the end of each mission trip. It was a pattern that centered more on the donations volunteers could bring and volunteers’ sense of emotional fulfillment, the report found, than on the needs of the children.

Styffe’s broader view of the complexities surrounding orphaned and vulnerable children—ultimately, the problem of global poverty—may also have led Styffe to another of her unorthodox views. Unlike most of her colleagues at the Saddleback summit, Styffe had nothing but praise for UNICEF, which she commended for taking more concrete steps to get children out of orphanages than Christian groups have ever done: “It makes me angry that people not in church are doing more to end the orphan crisis than us,” she told the crowd. Styffe’s surprising message seemed to demonstrate that, whatever failings the Christian adoption movement has had in the past—placing self-serving goals above the best interests of children and lending their power to a frequently corrupt industry—the community is capable of working in ways that lead not back to the familiar cycle of adoption boom and bust but instead toward sustainable development in partnership with local leaders.