Ethiopia’s Most Important Voices are Missing

The following was posted to a Yahoo support group for Ethiopian adoptions, and Rally was given permission to post it here. Unfortunately, for the PAPs who need to read this and most of all believe it, the message is getting lost. But we cannot emphasize more strongly how important the author’s message is about the “important voices missing.” As long as international adoption remains PAP-centric, those who have a vested interest in keeping corrupt programs open will do their utmost to keep those voices silent.

“I realized with a start that there are some important voices missing from any information collected online or through conversation about agencies…and they are the voices of the birth parents or extended families of these children.

This is no small thing. Adoptive Parents are the ultimate beneficiaries of adoption (we experience no loss, unlike our children or their birth families), and we are the only voices that we hear. We don’t hear from the children themselves, until they are past the age when it matters. Nor do we ever hear from first families.

The internet has begun to change some of that in the Western world. Now you have websites like the FirstMotherForum, Declassified Adoptee, Lost Daughters, The Mothers Project, and others which give us insight into the type of adoption coercion that can happen in adoption. But we don’t have this first hand information for many international adoptions.

Maybe your agency didn’t coerce a birth mother…or maybe they do “soft referrals” and then twist a few arms, make a birth parent feel guilty by dangling “health care/education” in front of them, talk about shame/selfishness, or imply that the arrangement is temporary and that their child will be returning to them when they have graduated from college? Maybe the village’s kabele twisted a few arms, knowing that money from AP’s or agencies would keep flowing to local projects? Maybe an extended family member or family elder made this decision “in the family’s best interest” over the protests of the birth parent (whose only social support network IS the family, so they feel that they cannot disagree)?

Strangely, as I was writing the preceding paragraph, I could have been describing closed adoption in the 60’s and 70’s (except for the part about the village kebele). Google “Baby Scoop Era”.

I was once in the shoes of many people who came to this forum when I was younger. I had visions of a (maybe slightly malnourished) baby (under 12 months!) in a far away orphanage who had lost both parents (and all grandparents or aunts/uncles). And had no siblings. How perfect! I could give a loving home to that child!

And then I did research, traveled internationally to impoverished areas. Revised my expectations. Okay, so, maybe I would specify a boy! And he would be under 3 years old! And maybe have a slight birth defect that was still correctable. Maybe the grandparents were living, but, um, too old to care for him. Still, parents are dead, no siblings.

And then we began to hear the things coming out of Ethiopia. How the agencies and the money at the local level that the agencies bring to an impoverished area (through supporting local orphanages financially, etc.) are actually making it harder for birth parents and extended family to justify keeping children. How corruption is creating a group of relinquishing birth parents who believe that they will have money given to them, or the education of their other children paid for, or health care for a sick family member covered, or their children will come back to them, or–at the very least–they will be receiving regular letters/updates/photos about their children for the rest of their lives. How village elders pressure widowed, single parents–especially women–to give children away. So, we revised again. Okay, male younger than 5 to keep birth order, waiting child with potential complex medical problems. Maybe one birth parent…a sick or older parent. But definitely no extended family who could take the child. No way.

And even after all of that. After all of those revisions in the face of what we were uncovering, nothing quite prepared me for the reality that was our adoption, the hustle of adoption tourism in country, the hoardes of Westerners from the Americas, Australia, Europe all there spending cash on their adoption trips. The hard truths about our son’s first family (that weren’t discovered until we were back for our second trip and were mere hours from leaving the country). The social worker for the local orphanage point blank asking for money in front of the birth family, and after I protested, looking me right in the eyes and smiling, “But all of the families give it! The families from the US, Netherlands, Spain, all of them! You don’t have to go through your agency! You can send it directly to me! And I’m the one that makes sure that the family receives your letters!” Oh dear God, so it’s come to this, has it? Implied blackmail?

You can point fingers and gnash your teeth and wail that it isn’t fair, that I have my child home, and why should I care what you do? But I wish someone has spoken so plainly to me. Because now I have to explain this all to my son when he is older. And what a rotten story it is. And encourage him to go back and visit his siblings (surprise!) and father and extended family (surprise again!) and not feel burdened by their expectations, or wracked with guilt over his/their fate, or deeply grieving about the lost relationships and years with the family that loves him so. All because the orphanage wanted the kids, don’t you see? And to hell with everyone else, because if we helped them, we wouldn’t get the kids!

Those are the voices that are missing. The birth father’s voice. The birth mother’s voice. The older brother and sister’s voice. The grandmother, the aunt, the beloved cousin who was raised as a sibling. Those are the voices that are missing in this discussion of what agency did what, and who is ethical or not. Because if they treated some PAP’s poorly? Imagine how they treated the birth families.

Everyone loves to throw around the UNICEF 4.5 million orphans number. But, did you know that only 22,500 of that 4.5 million are children under the age of 5 who have lost both parents? Before you dismiss that as a lot, remember that most of these are 22,500 are not healthy children, nor are they infants, nor only single children (versus part of a sibling group). Now you’ve whittled down that number to thousands if you are only looking at single, healthy-ish infants, having lost both parents, under the age of 24 months. And all of a sudden, there are PAP’s from over 30 US agencies clamoring to place these childen, essentially competing with agencies from France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Australia, Canada, others–all chasing this same relatively small group of children.

You can see where the problems happen. Local orphanages make money. They do not do what they do for free, nor out of the goodness of their hearts. [Author asked us to omit a line about searcher fees.] To have the searcher say the child was abandoned (where abandoned children move faster through court than relinquished ones do), and then shop them to an intercountry agency who is none the wiser, even grateful, that they have an infant to place with a PAP who only wants a infant…well. Okay then! There is a need, a demand, and people willing to pay for the demand to be filled. This creates a supply. Simple economics. And this demand-supply pipeline is being created by us…the PAPs.

 

Everyone wants to believe that their child won’t come into their family through these types of circumstances. Everyone wants to believe that unethical problems happen to someone else, that they won’t have to watch their child sob for a birth parent who they know is still alive. I did too.”

 

Sources

The author cited these sources for the numbers

 

www.brandeis.edu/investigate/adoption/ethiopia.html

 

www.brandeis.edu/investigate/adoption/orphanstatistics.html

 

www.unicef.org/media/media_45279.html

 

REFORM Talk Links

 

We would also like to point out a few more resources.

 

The first link is a 20 minute video of how Ethiopia is taking care of AIDS orphans (and it doesn’t involve adoption) Whose Children Are They Now? from 2006.

 

The second link is an October 2011 post citing 80% of petitions to the US embassy had inconsistencies, errors or insufficient evidence to classify the child as an orphan.

DOS Says 80% petitions contained inconsistencies

The last link is most important-it is a 2010 report by a global health and international development group (not related to adoption) on orphanages Improving Care in Ethiopia study

On page 12 of the long pdf that we link to is the following statistic: number of children in the 87 orphanages (note that none at the time were open for IA, but in light of the Awassa closures and some agencies ramping up programs in other areas, THIS HAS BECOME CRITICAL INFORMATION):

“At the time of the study, a total of 6,503 children, of which the majority (59 percent) was male, were residing in the 87 institutions”

So whatever number you want to believe-5 million kids “need adoptive homes”, 450,000 kids “need adoptive homes”, 22,500 kids “need adoptive homes”…whatever…the kids that are to be adopted SHOULD BE residing in orphanages and in those 87, there were only 6,503 kids.

So WHERE are the adopted kids coming from?

THE REAL QUESTION: WHICH CHILDREN ARE BEING PUT INTO THE ADOPTION PIPELINE?

PAPs need to get their heads out of the sand and start to reconcile the numbers being advertised with the real number in the orphanages and with the age, gender and quantity of those being placed internationally. IT DOES NOT ADD UP.

 

REFORM Puzzle Piece