Story

“Child Harvesting” in Ethiopia’s Adoption Program

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

Children's clothing hangs at the Children's Cross Connection (CCC) orphanage in Sodo, a city in Ethiopia's Southern Nations, Nationalities and People's Region, a southern province where many of Ethiopia's adoptees come from. Image by Michael Tsegaye. Ethiopia, 2011.

Orphanage director Stephne Bowers gives a tour of the grounds. Dozens of infants, toddlers, and young children are in the home awaiting adoption through CCC’s sponsoring agency, Christian World Adoption. Image by Michael Tsegaye. Ethiopia, 2011.

High chairs line the wall in the orphanage, where photographing children awaiting adoption is against policy. Image by Michael Tsegaye. Ethiopia, 2011.

Children’s cribs in the orphanage. Since Ethiopia’s government has begun closing down orphanages that exist only as transit homes to facilitate adoptions, approximately 25 additional children from the closed orphanages have been sent to the Sodo CCC home. Image by Michael Tsegaye. Ethiopia, 2011.

A caretaker at CCC looks into the baby room. Image by Michael Tsegaye. Ethiopia, 2011.

A woman walks by the dirt road outside the orphanage’s gates. Image by Michael Tsegaye. Ethiopia, 2011.

Bowers stands in the center of the cramped but neat orphanage compound. Image by Michael Tsegaye. Ethiopia, 2011.

On a hill above Sodo, Bowers and CCC hope to build a new compound, Wolaitta Children’s Village, to house their adoption and community programs, as well as new money-making ventures like a guest home for adoptive parents. Image by Michael Tsegaye. Ethiopia, 2011.

Cars and pedestrians mingle on the streets of central Sodo. Image by Michael Tsegaye. Ethiopia, 2011.

Many children in Ethiopia live on the streets. They are very unlikely to be helped by orphanage or adoption programs, which mostly serve children relinquished from poor but intact families. Image by Michael Tsegaye. Ethiopia, 2011.

The older siblings of three girls placed with American families through Christian World Adoption (the partner of the local CCC orphanages) pose with one of the pictures they have of their departed sisters. It is not uncommon for families of adopted children to live a middle-class life by Ethiopian standards. Image by Michael Tsegaye. Ethiopia, 2011.

Pictures of the adopted girls share a frame with a photo of the family’s mother, who died in childbirth years earlier. The family maintains that they were told adoption was a temporary education program. The American adoptive parents say they were falsely told the father was dying of HIV/AIDS. Image by Michael Tsegaye. Ethiopia, 2011.

The family outside their house. “If we knew that it was for good,” says oldest sister Aynelum (right), “we would not have let them leave this country or our family.” Image by Michael Tsegaye. Ethiopia, 2011.

Ethiopia accounted for nearly a quarter of all international adoptions to the U.S. in 2010, second only to China. That represented a staggering increase in the space of five years--so rapid that some locals said it was “becoming the new export industry for our country.”

In 2009 and 2010, the country faced a wave of allegations of adoption corruption and trafficking. In the two most notable cases, the evangelical agencies Christian World Adoption and Better Future Adoption Services were accused, respectively, of unethically recruiting children for adoption in a process the government calls “child harvesting” and fraudulently altering paperwork to cast children with intact families as orphans whose parents had died or abandoned them.