The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (47 page)

But as well respected within the movement as Styffe is, as of late 2012 her perspective is not reflected in the dominant message of the movement. As the adoption reform advocate David Smolin noted about other fledgling efforts to broaden the movement’s aims, what matters most is the message that Christians on the ground are hearing from movement leaders. And that message is the one that even Styffe’s boss and pastor, Rick Warren, repeated in the promise he made to a cheering audience at the same Christian Alliance Summit: “When I say orphan care, it’s adoption first, second, and last.”

SOME FACILITATORS
in Rwanda believed that MIGEPROF’s reluctance to embrace international adoption obscured a larger orphan problem than the country acknowledged. Although MIGEPROF officials told me in 2011 that there were just a paltry thirty-eight hundred orphans in the country—a figure reflecting only the wards of the country’s officially
recognized orphanages—Jana Jenkins countered with an estimate of one million orphaned children, based on UNICEF’s toll of vulnerable kids.

As in other countries, neither the government’s likely underestimate nor the misapplied UNICEF number give any indication of how many Rwandan children need to be adopted. But to adoption advocates, the knowledge that there are children in the country’s other thirty-three orphanages, which are not authorized to conduct adoptions, can amount to the frustrating conviction that there are many more children just out of reach. “The ironic thing is there are children, they’re just not in that one orphanage,” Jenkins told me, referring to the Home of Hope. “At the Noel orphanage, there are tons of babies.”

She meant the Noel Orphanage at Nyundo Rwanda in Gisenyi, a border town in the far northwest corner of Rwanda, its hazy skyline ringed by a range of jagged volcanoes and its city edge marked by a long fence and two checkpoints, separating it from the shanty-town sprawl of the Congolese city of Goma. A steady trail of vendors walked across the border in both directions, their heads laden with bundles of branches, sacks of onions and cabbages, and eggs nestled in trays, stacked ten rows high. The plastic bags that have been outlawed in Rwanda since 2005 as part of an antilitter campaign flew freely on the Goma side, catching in the fence, and Goma’s corrugated metal shacks stood in sharp contrast to the Mc-Mansions that the smuggling class
nouveau riche
in Gisenyi had built.

Across town from the border is the Catholic-run Noel Orphanage, the oldest and largest children’s home in Rwanda, which housed nearly six hundred children in 2011. The orphans at Noel range from just months old up to twenty-six years, explained assistant administrator Augustine Twagira, a soft, kindly man in high-waisted jeans and a neatly tucked polo shirt. Because children in Rwanda are traditionally considered part of their parents’ homes until around the age of thirty, older orphans, including children old enough to have survived the genocide, may live in institutions until their late twenties.

In a series of clean and cheerful rooms babies grouped by age lay in orderly rows of well-cushioned cribs, swaddled in heavy blankets and tended by nurses with infants strapped tightly to their backs. Toddlers pretended to nap, giggling, laying on mattresses that had been taken off their bed frames and arranged on the floor to accommodate more kids. Auxiliary dormitories had been crafted in the medical clinic because there were simply too many children for the space, and in the foyer of each room nurses sat on the floor, quietly feeding children who had just woken up. In the fields outside, older children played soccer or worked in a
spacious woodshop set next to the orphanage vegetable garden. Near Noel’s library, outside a building designated for residents with developmental disabilities, a young woman reached out to hug Twagira fiercely, and then both my Rwandan guide and me.

It’s a massive orphanage, run by a minimum of seventy-one regular staff members and volunteers—sometimes more. The line of well-tended, quiet babies would likely make any prospective adoptive parent sputter at the idea that Rwanda has no children for them to parent. But, as Twagira explained, only a small proportion of the children in Noel could ever be considered for adoption. Of the six hundred, MIGEPROF tallied only eighty as possibilities. Twagira put the number at half that—forty.

When I visited in 2011 nearly 250 children at the orphanage were eighteen or older; only 150 were under five. And of that number some children not only had families but had families who were involved. While I visited, one father from the local community, dressed sharply in a crisp lavender shirt, came to visit his infant daughter. As a young widower, he had followed the local custom to put his baby in the orphanage for care and feeding until she grew to around three years old, because infant formula was prohibitively expensive and, culturally, young children are considered too difficult for single Rwandan men to care for. Beaming and holding his daughter’s finger as she sat with a nurse, the father posed for a picture with the child he would one day take home.

“There are about forty children here who have fathers,” Twagira told me, noting that high maternal mortality rates made this visiting father’s situation relatively normal. “When they are three, he has to come back and pick her up, or we will go to the local authorities,” Twagira continued, suggesting that parents who don’t return for their children will be reported for abandonment.

It was a scenario—reintegrating children into their families—that Twagira was also preparing to deal with on a larger scale, as Noel, like the rest of the country’s orphanages, readied itself for the coming deinstitutionalization project that would largely clear their home of its wards. “It’s very nice,” Twagira said philosophically, considering the plan. “It’s better to be in the family than in an institution. Many children here will go to their families—those that have relatives.”

Noel’s resident children, like those in the rest of the country, had been assessed by Hope and Homes for Children, a UK-based organization that has consulted on orphanage de-institutionalization programs in countries like Romania and Bosnia and that Rwanda’s government commissioned to collect accurate data on all of the country’s institutionalized children.
Twagira estimated there were about 250 children at Noel who had lost both parents. Some of those might go to extended family, and for others, a government plan to establish several older children in a joint household might apply.

For the others, said Vianney Rangira, country director of Hope and Homes for Children, the government hoped to foster domestic adoptions by Rwandans. To that end the government had embarked on an educational program to explain the process of domestic adoption to local citizens—a markedly easier process than international applicants face—and was working with churches to replicate more emergency foster care systems like the one the Jenkins’ Christ’s Church had begun.

In December 2011 Rwandan Prime Minister Pierre Damien Habumuremyi had visited Noel Orphanage and publicly announced that he was adopting a child from the home. “Leaders should serve as examples in giving another chance to less privileged children,” he declared. “I will take the lead by adopting a child myself from this orphanage.” He proposed that if more Rwandans adopted, within the year there would be no more orphanages. Habumuremyi asked local leaders to help promote adoption by including it as a consideration in their performance contracts.

“Now the problem we have is to set up a campaign to encourage people to adopt,” said UNICEF’s Ngabonziza. He and other leaders as well as the government had decided the best place to start would be in the churches, “because of their contact with the population and the prestige of their word.”

Churches have responded, including Saddleback’s Rwanda team. Styffe told me that some of Saddleback’s partner churches in Rwanda had been helping to trace children in orphanages to see whether they have families and, if so, what support the families need to bring their children back home. And Munyemana said that Saddleback has established a pilot initiative in the Western city of Kibuye, where an initial group of one hundred families has taken in orphans through informal foster care arrangements, and local churches were trying to help support them with donations to offset the additional financial burden they had assumed. The arrangements weren’t full legal adoptions, with families committing to the children as new sons and daughters; that was a step Munyemana thought would have to come down the line. “It’s the first major step of willingly going and bringing a needy person into your home,” he told me. “It may eventually go to that [next step of legal adoption], but it’s a process. It’s not just telling people, ‘Now adopt.’ There is an education process to make them understand all the implications.”

When Munyemana traveled to Saddleback Church in April 2012 for the Christian Alliance Summit, he gently told the American crowd to consider Rwandans as capable partners in orphan care and to support their efforts to increase adoption at home rather than just see Rwanda as another source for international adoptees. “Trust that the local church leaders know their context better than you,” he said.

By the end of 2011 only a handful of children had been reunited with their families, MIGEPROF’s Uwababyeyi told Rwanda’s the
New Times
. Some children in orphanages feared that communities they were returned to would reject them, as Rwanda’s small size and dense population means that inherited agricultural land comes at a high premium. (Indeed, one aspect of the 1994 genocide was an effective land grab from the dispossessed minority.) The first orphanages began closing in June 2012, shortly after the launch of the new oversight body for Rwandan adoptions, the National Commission for Children (NCC). But the process was extremely slow.

Many in the adoption community were skeptical about how well deinstitutionalization would work. “It sounds great in theory,” Jana Jenkins said, “but does Rwanda really have what it takes to follow up on all those cases? A lot of times kids come running back to the orphanage. They haven’t been around for years, and they’re kind of strangers to their families.” Domestic adoptions, she worried, could prove even harder. “Africans are very good at taking care of extended family, but it kind of goes against the grain to take care of a child that’s not blood-related.”

Jenkins suspected the government had already given up on the prospect of many Rwandans adopting. Further, because few families had initially volunteered to adopt—perhaps due to the legacy of failed adoptions after the genocide—and the Rwandan adoptive families she knew were secretive about their adoptions, the government was shifting their push to long-term foster care instead. A more obvious explanation might simply be Rwanda’s widespread poverty and the hardship to poor families of taking on additional costs for food, education, clothing, and health care. Noel Orphanage’s Twagira said that, by July 2011, Noel had received only four requests for domestic adoptions. “I think it’s the poverty—when you have a daddy who is not able to care [for his child], how will someone else be able to come and take them from the orphanage?” he asked. “The government wants to make more demand, but it’s a process to sensitize the population.”

Rwanda’s situation is not unique. These same sorts of hurdles—or, more optimistically, growing pains—have impacted other countries attempting to increase domestic adoptions over international. Dale Edmonds, a director
of the Riverkids Foundation, an NGO dedicated to fighting child trafficking in Cambodia, blogged about the resistance he had encountered in promoting domestic adoption in that country, as international colleagues objected that domestic Cambodian adoptions tended too often to fail. “I think this is a case of theory and practice,” Edmonds wrote. “We can say in theory [that] kinship, then local, then international adoptions are best. But if we don’t give enough support at each stage, we’re going to default to international where the adoptive families in general have way more resources.” Considering the financial incentives international adoption already has on its side, bringing thousands of Western dollars into a developing economy every time a child goes overseas, breaking the cycle of adoption boom and bust will require not just support but also patience as well as the understanding that domestic adoption and other local solutions aren’t a step too far rather but something that can be learned, slowly by slowly, as Rwandans say.

IN MARCH 2012,
after ten months of being fostered by Dave and Jana Jenkins, baby Gabriel Mugisha was adopted to an American couple from Texas, Mark and Chelsea Jacobs, who ran a Christian organization called His Chase Foundation that supported various orphan care projects across Africa. Jana had been representing the Jacobs as power of attorney in another, failed attempt to adopt a child from Noel Orphanage, and the Jacobs referred to the Jenkins as “good friends.”

Gabriel became the first child Rwanda’s new NCC had matched. The Jenkins had visited the region of Gabriel’s birth to assist in a local government investigation of whether he had extended family who could care for him, and when no family was found, they documented his status as abandoned in the same way the Home of Hope adoption orphanage would have done. Because his story had become so central to Christ Church’s young orphan program—and such a frequent focus of Dave’s writing on his blog and for local Rwandan newspapers—they determined they should have a community send-off for the boy. This was another first: the church’s “first ever Adoption Hand Over Ceremony,” at which the Jenkins and other church leaders spoke as the boy’s “uncles and aunts.” In pictures on Dave’s blog, the Jacobs, a young, white couple, sat in white plastic chairs inside the church, holding Gabriel, who was dressed in an argyle sweater, as the congregation reached out their arms in blessing and the Jenkins family kneeled in front of them, their heads bowed in prayer.

On his blog Dave explained that Gabriel’s health issues had convinced them and Rwandan officials that the boy needed to be raised either by a Rwandan family with the financial capacity to take him on regular trips to advanced hospitals in Kenya or South Africa, or by an international adoptive family from North America or Europe. In the fall of 2011 Gabriel had begun having convulsions and seizures multiple times a day, seemingly due to a brain injury from his birth and requiring treatment that couldn’t be found in Rwanda.