As the "searchers" who track down adopted
children's histories increasingly uncover stories of fraud, corruption, and
worse, these specialists are facing threats and even violence
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Mirette and Elsabet Franklin, ages 4 and 6, biological
sisters adopted in Ethiopia, listen to the singing of the national anthem
during a U.S. naturalization ceremony
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In 2008, a 38-year old Oklahoma nurse whom I'll call Kelly
adopted an eight-year old girl, "Mary," from Ethiopia. It was the
second adoption for Kelly, following one from Guatemala. She'd sought out a
child from Ethiopia in the hopes of avoiding some of the ethical p
roblems of
adopting from Guatemala: widespread stories of birthmothers coerced to give up
their babies and even payments and abductions at the hands of brokers procuring
adoptees for unwitting U.S. parents. Now, even after using a reputable agency
in Ethiopia, Kelly has come to believe that Mary never should have been placed
for adoption. She came to this determination after hiring
what's known as an
adoption searcher.
Adoption searchers -- specialized independent researchers
working in a unique field that few outside the community of adoptive parents
even know exists -- track down the birth families of children adopted from
other counties. In Ethiopia, searching has arisen in response to a dramatic
boom in international adoptions from the country in recent years. In 2010,
Ethiopia accounted for nearly a quarter of all international adoptions to the
U.S. The number of Ethiopian children adopted into foreign families in the
U.S., Canada, and Europe has risen from just a few hundred several years ago to
several thousand last year. The increase has been so rapid -- and, for some, so
lucrative -- that some locals have said adoption was "becoming the new
export industry for our country."
That increase has also brought stories of corruption, child
trafficking, and fraud. Parents began to publicize the stories their adopted
children told them when they learned English: that they had parents and
families at home, who sometimes thought they were going to the U.S. to receive
an education and then return. Media investigations have found evidence that
adoption agencies had recruited children from intact families. Ethiopia's
government found that some children's paperwork had been doctored to list
children who had been relinquished by living parents as orphans instead, which
allowed the agencies to avoid lengthy court vetting procedures.
"Her entire paperwork, except for a couple of names,
was completely falsified," Kelly said. Mary's paperwork listed her as two
years younger than she was; it said she had one older sister when she in fact
had two younger sisters; and, most importantly, it said her mother had died
years ago. "One day I said to Mary, 'You know how your paperwork says you
were five and you're really seven?" Kelly recalled. "It also says
that your mom's dead.' And she goes, 'My mom's not dead.' She was adamant that
her mother wasn't dead, and in fact she wasn't. Her mom is alive and it took
our searcher just two days to find her."
Kelly, through a friend who'd also adopted from Ethiopia,
hired a searcher. She sent copies of all her paperwork and waited for him to
make the nine-hour drive from the capital, Addis Ababa, to the northern region
from which Mary had been adopted.
The searcher determined Mary's real birth date, that her
birth family and mother were OK with the adoption, and also collected some
photos as well as information about Mary's background. Kelly is planning to
take Mary back to visit her family in March.
"I wanted to verify that she hadn't been stolen. I
searched with the intention of sending her back to Ethiopia if I found out
she'd been stolen," said Kelly.
Kelly doesn't believe her agency knowingly falsified the
information. As with many cases of fraud or corruption in Ethiopia's adoption
program, it seems that the story was changed at the local level, long before
the adoption proceeded to the country's federal courts and oversight agencies.
Mary's grandfather, who had often been her main caregiver, relinquished the
child while her mother was working elsewhere in Ethiopia; something that was
only possible because he and several witnessed claimed that the mother had
died.
"I can't imagine the weight that was on her,"
Kelly said of Mary's recollection of her home in Ethiopia. "After I told
her the paperwork said her mom was dead, she thought maybe she was dead and
nobody told her. So it was huge for her to know she was right, that her mother
was alive. I was lucky she remembered and was strong enough to stick with her
story."
SEARCHING
This summer, I accompanied a young Ethiopian searcher I'll
call Samuel on a birth family interview: a trek deep into the rural countryside
of Ethiopia's Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People's Region (SNNPR), the
province of origin for many Ethiopian children adopted to the West, to locate
the family of a toddler-age girl adopted to Canada.
Starting in the southern town of Sodo, we took a 12-mile
drive through rural roads that were so bad it took over an hour: first over
deeply-potted dirt throughways, cutting across expanses of grazing land, then
off-road until we arrived at a hamlet so small and remote it might have been
impossible to find without a guide. But even this village -- a handful of
houses and an HIV clinic -- was not our destination. We took a dirt path
through the backcountry, but our Land Ranger got stuck in deep trenches of mud.
A handful of local children emerged shyly from the bordering fields and led us,
on foot, the last half mile up to a solitary mud-walled house surrounded by
lush gardens and neatly fenced in with stripped tree branches.
When we arrived, only a toddler boy stood in the front yard,
naked below the waist. But the spectacle of several travelers carrying tripod
and camera quickly drew nearly 30 neighboring children and adults, who watched
solemnly while Samuel framed shots of the exterior of the house. The
birthmother Samuel sought to interview, a widow in her early 40s with seven
other children still at home, was called from a neighbor's house to host her
unexpected guests. She smilingly obliged without question when Samuel and his
colleagues explained that they'd come to film for several hours at the request
of her daughter's new adoptive parents. Sitting in a chair in the fields behind
her house, her fingertips pressed together and her eyes cast down, she answered
dozens of questions about her background, her remaining children, and the
circumstances of her husband's death, which had prompted the adoption.
For several years, Samuel, a soft-spoken filmmaker from
Addis Ababa in his mid-20s, has traveled deep into Ethiopia's countryside to
locate the remaining parents, brothers, sisters, and neighbors of Ethiopian
children adopted to the U.S. and Europe. For a moderate fee -- around $600,
including travel and lodging expenses for a two or three person crew -- he
would create a DVD of interviews with family members and a brief glimpse of the
country the child came from. He started doing this work for a prominent U.S.
adoption agency then later moved on to independent production, working from a
script of 60 to 70 questions he'd compile with the adoptive family to ask of
whatever closest relative or neighbor could be found.
But, in the past several years, it's become increasingly
difficult to find a searcher in Ethiopia. Tasked with determining whether an
adopted child is a "manufactured orphan," searchers have faced
intense intimidation in Ethiopia as its adoption system boomed and then came
under international scrutiny. It took months to find adoptive families willing
to share the name or contact information for searchers they had used. The first
several times I emailed or called Samuel, he responded with trepidation,
confirming with me repeatedly that I was not associated with any adoption
agencies working in Ethiopia and that I wouldn't pass on his name or
information to any agencies.
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Taxis and donkeys vie for space on a busy street in Sodo, a
city in the Southern Nations Nationalities and People's Region, where many
Ethiopian adoptees come from.
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He had good reason to be cautious. In August 2010, Samuel
was jailed for 41 days in the northern Ethiopian province of Tigray, which
shares a hostile border with neighboring Eritrea. He had traveled to the region
to film two birth family interviews, one of which Samuel says he did pro bono
out of his respect for the family, which had adopted an HIV-positive child.
When Samuel met the birth sister of one of the children whose story he was
tracking, the local director of a U.S. adoption agency came along, and began
accusing Samuel of giving the agency a bad name. (Out of fear of further
repercussions, Samuel requested that the agency not be named.) Shortly
thereafter, Samuel and his crew were arrested. While in jail, he was told that
the arrest was made at the request of the agency, which had accused him of
performing illegal adoptions and of filming the "bad side" of
Ethiopia to sell to the Eritrean government. An employee of the agency was also
arrested -- it's still not clear why -- as well as three of Samuel's friends
and a translator.
Although his jailers treated him as a serious criminal, in
time, with the help of U.S. adoptive families, Samuel's case reached the
attention of the U.S. and federal Ethiopian governments. Families who had
adopted through the agency raised thousands of dollars for bail and led a
letter-writing campaign that spurred the Ethiopian ambassador to the U.S., at
the consulate in Los Angeles, to get involved.
Lisa Veleff Day, a Portland, Maine, mother to two Ethiopian
children, participated in the campaign. A number of families in Portland have
adopted from Ethiopia, and several had turned to Samuel to help uncover their
children's backgrounds -- often after they became suspicious of the stories
their agencies had told them. Veleff Day did not hire Samuel -- she was able to
find information about her children through a member of their birth family with
ties to Portland -- but she had used the same agency that was behind his
jailing and had come to doubt their ethics. During one of the last steps of her
adoption -- an appointment with the U.S. embassy in Addis Ababa to secure a
visa -- the agency's country representative coached her to say that her
children's birth parents were dead. The representative threatened Veleff Day
that the adoption would fall through if she did not.
