Ethiopia's orphans face life of hardship
From Times Online April 4, 2009
Ethiopia's orphans face life of hardship
Jonathan Clayton
The Ethiopian peasant farmer and his wife shuffled painfully into the orphanage. They were in the last stages of Aids and had only weeks to live. However, they were happy. They had heard the Franciscan nuns had found a home for their three children and had come to say farewell.
“I am so happy, they are going to stay together,” the father, Solomon, whispered as he embraced a middle-aged Mormon couple from Salt Lake City, Utah. “Now, I can die peacefully. They will go to school in America and have a future. It is good they leave here.” As they embraced their two daughters, aged 8 and 6, for the last time the tears ran freely. Their four-year-old son did not appreciate the significance of the moment and ran off to play with friends.
Sister Luthgarder, a seasoned veteran of such heart-rending adoptions, explained: “It is sad, but it is so rare they are kept together and so I am happy.” Only a week previously a brother and sister were separated: one going to Norway, the other to Canada. “The new parents said they would take them to see each other every year, but inevitably they will grow apart,” she said.
Only a fraction of Ethiopia’s burgeoning population of orphaned children, now put at five million, find their way to Kidane Meheret Children’s Home. Even fewer leave and they are certainly the lucky ones.
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A few miles away, dozens of children sleep in drains at night and beg by day at the sprawling central bus station. They face constant dangers.
“Some are forced into prostitution, some are sold by relatives after their parents die, they are kept as maids and often abused,” said Dagmawi Alemayeau who runs an organisation, Forum on Street Children, which tries to fight trafficking. Most of an estimated 50,000 children on the streets of the capital, Addis Ababa, at some stage pass through the bus station where he has his office.
“Traffickers go to the rural areas ... there are places where you can even buy a baby for as little as $1,” he told The Times. He always keeps an eye open at the international airport where so-called “uncles” can often be spotted boarded planes to Gulf states with teenage girls.
Across the rest of Africa, a combination of soaring populations, growing poverty and the HIV-Aids epidemic has led to a huge increase in orphans.
A UNICEF report estimates that in sub-Saharan Africa alone there will be more than 20 million by 2010.
Cash-strapped governments on the world’s poorest continent are overwhelmed. They can afford only a handful of government run agencies. Despite an increase in foreign adoptions, some well-publicised like those of Madonna and Angelina Jolie, who has adopted from Ethiopia and Cambodia, only a tiny fraction of these children find new homes overseas.
Organisations like UNICEF and the UK’s Save the Children Fund are opposed to foreign adoptions, advocating instead that the children be placed in extended families or locally adopted so they grow up within his or her own cultural identity.
They encourage would be parents to send money instead to help look after the children in the country of origin. But they are often accused of a head in the sand approach to the abuse the child may face and ignore the fact that by so doing they often condemn the child to a life of grinding poverty and no education. “Adoption is sad, very sad but the whole issue is sad, a life of neglect, and abandonment, grinding poverty and abuse is sad, adoption is often the lesser evil especially as the people who come here are good and very carefully checked,” added Sister Luthgarder who finds at least one new born baby a week on her doorstep.
This point was made by Malawi’s president Bingu wa Mutharika with disarming frankness earlier this week. “I wish someone had come and taken 10,000 Malawian children because then I would know that 10,000 Malawians would have better education and opportunities,” he told The Times.
ST. PAUL , Minnesota : Ethiopia was not on Mark and Vera Westrum-Ostrom's list when they first visited Children's Home Society & Family Services here to explore an adoption. Ukraine was first, because of their family heritage, until the couple discovered that the adoption system there was chaotic, with inaccurate information about orphans' health and availability. Vietnam was second, after they saw videos of well-run orphanages. But the wait would be at least a year and a half. Then they learned about Ethiopia 's model centers for orphans, run by American agencies, with an efficient adoption system that made it possible for them to file paperwork in early September and claim 2-year-old Tariku, a boy with almond eyes and a halo of ringlets, at Christmas.
From Addis Ababa , the capital, they traveled to the countryside to meet the boy's birth mother, an opportunity rare in international adoption. The process was affordable compared with adoptions in other countries, and free of bribes, which are common in some nations.
Sisters Besso, 5, left, and Hattie, 11, at home in Minnesota . Besso is one of three Ethiopian siblings who joined the family via adoption. (Ben Garvin/The New York Times)
It is no wonder, given these advantages, that Ethiopia has become a hot spot for international adoption by Americans. Even before the actress Angelina Jolie put adoption in Ethiopia on the cover of People magazine in 2005, it was growing. The number of adoptions there by Americans is still small - 732 children in 2006, out of a total of 20,632 foreign adoptions. But the growth curve, up from 82 children in 1997, is the steepest that adoption officials have ever seen. Ethiopia now ranks fifth among countries for adoption by Americans, up from 16th in 2000. In the same time period, the number of American agencies licensed to operate there has grown to 22 from one.
The growing interest in Ethiopia comes at a time when the leading countries for international adoption - China , Guatemala and Russia - are, respectively, tightening eligibility requirements, under scrutiny for corruption in its adoption system, or closing the borders to American agencies. Ethiopia 's sudden popularity also comes with risks, U.S. and Ethiopian government officials say.
"I don't think we'll be able to handle it," said Haddush Halefom, an official at the Ministry of Women's Affairs, which oversees adoption. "We don't have the capacity to handle all these new agencies and we have to monitor the quality, not just the quantity."
Capping the number of agencies is one solution. And that is what some international adoption officials in the United States are now urging the Ethiopian government to do.
Late last month, the talk of the Ethiopian adoption chat rooms was Christian World Adoption, an established agency, although relatively new to Ethiopia , that gave three children to the wrong families. That case prompted inquiries by the U.S. State Department; the nonprofit Joint Council on International Children's Services in Virginia , a child welfare and advocacy organization; and the adoption agency itself, Thomas DiFilipo, president of the joint council, said.
Officials at Christian World Adoption did not reply to e-mail messages or telephone calls. But DiFilipo said the agency was reviewing its procedures and had hired immigration attorneys to reverse adoptions if the families wished to do so.
Ethiopia , with a population of 76 million, has an estimated five million orphans, according to aid organizations. Many African countries have outlawed or impeded the adoption of their children by foreigners.
Ethiopia has welcomed American and European families who are willing to provide homes for children who have lost both parents to AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis or starvation, or who come from families too destitute to feed and clothe them. Two elements distinguish Ethiopia 's adoption system, according to dozens of experts. One is the existence of transitional homes for orphans, in the countryside and in the capital, that are paid for by American agencies. These provide services and staffing rare in the developing world.
Not long ago, Sandra Iverson, a nurse from the first U.S. international adoption clinic, at the University of Minnesota , visited the Ethiopian centers of the Children's Home Society. She left confident that Ethiopia 's orphans enjoyed unusual care.
"You don't hear crying babies," she said. "They are picked up immediately."
The other signature of Ethiopian adoption is that adopting families are encouraged to meet birth families and visit the villages where the children were raised. Some adoption agencies provide DVDs or photographs that document the children's past. Russ and Ann Couwenhoven, in Ham Lake , Minnesota , recently showed one such video to 6-year-old Tariku, one of three children they have adopted from Ethiopia . The boy seemed proud of the uncle who had sheltered him for as long as he could
Linda Zwicky brought 2-year-old Amale home last month with a letter from her grandmother that described holding the motherless infant at her breast even though she had no milk.
Sometimes such vividness is too much. Melanie Danke and her husband, who live in Minneapolis , adopted siblings, 6-year-old twins and a 3-year-old. One of the twins "would work herself up until she was inconsolable" looking at photographs of the aunt and grandmother who raised her, Danke said. So she has tucked the photos away for now.
Some parents anguished, as did Karla Suomala of Decorah , Iowa , when she arrived in Addis Ababa to adopt 5-year-old Dawit and his 21-month-old sister, Meheret. "It's hard to know what the right thing is to do," Suomala said. "Should we just give all the money we're spending on this to the children's mother?"
Suomala and her husband, David Vasquez, had already spent time with her. "It was obvious the birth mother loved her children. She said to us, 'Thank you for sharing my burden,' " Vasquez said. Will Connors reported from Addis Ababa .
Published: June 4, 2007