Story

Who’s Intimidating Ethiopia’s Adoption Searchers?

January 05, 2012 | Pulitzer Center
By
Kathryn Joyce and Michael Tsegaye, for the Pulitzer Center, Sodo, Ethiopia

Rural Ethiopians walk for miles to collect water, reach a market, clinic or school. Image by Michael Tsegaye. Ethiopia, 2011.

People walking in Sodo, a city in the Southern Nations Nationalities and People's Region, where many Ethiopian adoptees come from. Image by Michael Tsegaye. Ethiopia, 2011.

Taxis and donkeys vie for space on a busy street in Sodo. Image by Michael Tsegaye. Ethiopia, 2011.

A farmer plows his field in the countryside outside Sodo. Image by Michael Tsegaye. Ethiopia, 2011.

A searcher and his team approach the home of a birth family. Image by Michael Tsegaye. Ethiopia, 2011.

A neighbor's child stands outside the birth family's home, constructed primarily from branches, mud and straw. Image by Michael Tsegaye. Ethiopia, 2011.

Inside the home of the birth family, not pictured to protect their privacy. Image by Michael Tsegaye. Ethiopia, 2011.

Livestock graze outside the homes of neighbors. Image by Michael Tsegaye. Ethiopia, 2011.

Unpaved roads and a lack of transportation leave rural families just 20 kilometers outside Sodo isolated. Image by Michael Tsegaye. Ethiopia, 2011.

In Ethiopia, specialized independent researchers known as "searchers" work in a unique field that few outside the community of adoptive parents even know exists. They track down an adopted child’s history and birth family, often at the behest of adoptive parents in the U.S. or Europe. But as more searchers turn up stories of fraud, corruption and worse, they are facing threats and violence, sometimes from representatives of adoption agencies that are well-known in the West.