Girl From Ethiopia

TWIN FEELINGS

This New York Times article about Haiti's struggling orphanages is an eye-opener. It explains a lot about the daily challenges of caring for orphans in an impoverished country.

This quote from a Haitian mother is just plain heart-breaking:

"So many women do not have jobs. They do not have land to grow food for their children. If their choice is to watch their children starve or give then away, they are going to  give them away, and hope that they have put them in good hands."

My own daughter's birth mother made that tough choice. I'm grateful to her. And today I'm incredibly sad for her.

So What Was It?

Were those Americans who tried to take Haitian children out of the country abducting them or adopting them?

I'd say it was both.

Every international adoption is fundamentally abduction. The child adopts a new country and at the same time is abducted from her own country. The child wasn't consulted, didn't choose to leave her home. She was simply taken away. From the child's point of view, that's abduction. There's no way around that messy fact, no matter how many uplifting names we give to adoption agencies -- Wide Horizons and Children's Hope and in the case of the Idaho church group's unofficial one, New Life Children's Refuge.

And let's be even more honest: we're so accustomed to seeing starving African babies --I still remember those late-night infomercials showcasing "Biafran" children with flies swarming around their crusty eyes -- that we don't think of them as having extended families, let alone mothers and fathers who love them.

Of course I understand the impulse to help. I feel it too. I want to see young victims from the earthquake saved now, want to staunch the suffering and loss of such a magnitude that it's beyond anyone's comprehension: One hundred and seventy thousand dead. One million homeless. Unfathomable. And yet it happened.

Still, why do we first think about quickly air-lifting those children out of the country, rather than push our own government for more long-term solutions -- to waive Haiti's debts, for example, so that this tiny, exploited nation can devote more resources to those very children we want to save?

Here's a tough question: Are our middle-class American homes better places for these children than their impoverished Haitian ones, where they have their culture, their loved ones, their homeland?

That begs a tougher question: Could the money spent on international adoption be better spent providing a child's family with the resources to keep him or her at home? It's a question with no easy answer, but it's a question we have to ask.

Those Idaho missionaries were thinking two-fold: they'd save lives AND provide some U.S. families with children they might not otherwise have. And if those children could become evangelical Christians rather than Voodoo practitioners -- did that increase their zeal, their sense of "do-good"?

Altruism laced with self-interest and hubris: That's what landed those missionaries in jail. It's a cautionary tale and we who believe in the fraught world of international adoption should take heed.