The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption by Kathryn Joyce

Author:Kathryn Joyce [Joyce, Kathryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Family & Relationships, Adoption & Fostering, Political Science, Political Ideologies, Conservatism & Liberalism, Religion, Fundamentalism, Social Science, Sociology of Religion
ISBN: 9781586489434
Google: RWk3kvgZoRoC
Amazon: B00BKRW582
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2013-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

A Little War

As traumatizing as a corrupt or wrongful adoption can be, it’s not yet the worst outcome for adoptees whose best interests haven’t been taken into account.

In the fall of 2005 Sam Allison, a housepainter in his thirties from Tennessee, arrived at Daniel Hoover Children’s Village, an orphanage housing more than four hundred children outside Monrovia, Liberia. Allison had come to adopt three children. He ended up with four: a five-year-old girl, to be renamed Cherish; her nine-year-old brother, Isaiah; their thirteen-year-old sister*, CeCe, who had taken care of her siblings for years; and a sickly infant from another orphanage named Engedi, whom Sam said he and representatives from the second orphanage had found when they’d gone “deep into the bush.”

The older children were happy to go. The orphanage was run by African Christians Fellowship International (ACFI), a “church planting” ministry that often had food shortages and rarely had school. For years Isaiah had been sexually abused there by an older ward. Once, during Liberia’s civil war, a twelve-year-old boy held a gun to Isaiah’s head. In 2003 rebels attacked the orphanage and the children all fled, with CeCe carrying Cherish and pulling Isaiah by the hand as she ran, guns firing behind them. Liberian kids called America “heaven,” and adoption, in a way, seemed like a ticket home for citizens of a country settled in part by freed American slaves, a nation that still sees itself as a fifty-first state, or at least an abandoned colony.

In Tennessee Sam and the four adoptees joined Sam’s wife, Serene, a thin brunette in her late twenties who had attempted a career in the Christian music industry, and the couple’s four biological children. Together the family moved to an off-the-grid log cabin Sam was building in Primm Springs, a rural hamlet outside Nashville, nestled in the hills around Tennessee’s Amish country. During their first days in Primm Springs Serene welcomed the children with familiar foods—rice, stew, sardines—and they were photographed in clean American clothes, smiling and laughing, happy to have arrived.

The Allisons’ cabin was on or next to a compound owned by Serene’s parents, Colin and Nancy Campbell, where Serene’s two sisters and their families also live. Colin pastored a small church, and Nancy, author of anticontraception books like Be Fruitful and Multiply, is a fundamentalist Christian women’s leader with a large following among homeschoolers. Her free magazine, Above Rubies, is a thirty-five-year-old institution that focuses on Christian wifehood and the imperative to bear many children. With a circulation of 130,000 across more than one hundred countries, the magazine has spawned a circuit of local Above Rubies ladies’ retreats in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Her followers are mostly large families, with eight, ten, or twelve children, who eschew contraception and adhere to rigid gender roles, in which husbands are spiritual leaders of the home, and wives their submissive “helpmeets.”

Although Nancy’s followers include many women who look the part, in floor-length denim jumpers and modest homemade dresses, the Campbell clan

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