Child Catchers : Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (9781586489434) by Joyce Kathryn

Author:Joyce, Kathryn [Joyce, Kathryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781586489434
Publisher: Perseus Book Group

IN THE PAST SEVERAL YEARS connecting with a searcher like the one Kelly used has become increasingly difficult. Although the information searchers bring back is often innocuous, a window into the world your child came from, searchers are also implicitly tasked with determining whether an adopted child is a “manufactured orphan”—a child with a family made to look parentless on paper. The contradictions searchers have unearthed in recent years have damaged the reputations of adoption agencies in Ethiopia. Agencies, some adoptive parents claim, have retaliated against searchers with legal action, jail time, and even death threats. In response, for a time Ethiopia’s adoption searchers went underground. Finding adoptive families willing to share the name or contact information of searchers they had used took months and, for me, months more to convince a young Ethiopian searcher I’ll call Samuel to meet with me.

For several years Samuel, a tall, soft-spoken filmmaker from Addis Ababa in his midtwenties, has traveled across Ethiopia to locate the remaining parents, brothers, sisters, and neighbors of Ethiopian children adopted to North America and Europe. For a moderate fee—around $600, plus travel and lodging for a two- or three-person crew—he creates a DVD of interviews with family members and a brief glimpse of the area the child is from. For Samuel, it’s a living as well as a source of personal fulfillment. He lost his own father at seven, and his mother, who had not had a lasting relationship with the father, could tell Samuel little more than that he had been tall. Like many others in Ethiopia, Samuel worries that adopted children who don’t know their background will face an identity crisis down the line.

Samuel started making the DVDs for a prominent US adoption agency, then later moved on to independent production, working from a script of sixty to seventy questions to ask of whatever closest relative or neighbor can be found. The questions ranged from the specific, about how each child was relinquished, to broader cultural queries about wedding ceremonies and cultural observances in the region the child came from.

The first several times I e-mailed 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 of them. He had good reason to be cautious. In August 2010 Samuel was jailed for forty-one 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 said 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 US 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 either.

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