Ethiopia to Cut Adoptions by 90%
This past weekend Voice of America, the official external radio and television broadcasting service of the United States federal government, reported that “Ethiopia is cutting back by as much as 90 percent the number of inter-country adoptions it will allow, as part of an effort to clean up a system rife with fraud and corruption.” You can read the full article HERE.
Needless to say, among anyone associated with adoption from Ethiopia, this news created quite a stir, especially here around the interwebs. Tweets were tweeted. Posts were posted. Forums and comment sections of blogs were inundated with concerned adopting families, both current and prospective, desperate seeking more information. The problem was there wasn’t any.
My dad first made me aware of the news Sunday night after he read a blog post by Tom Davis over on beliefnet. I, like so many others, began looking for more only to find nothing. Sure, if you googled “Ethiopia Cut Adoptions” you found thousands of results. Most of them using the exact same wording: “Ethiopia to cut adoptions by 90%”. The reason why, though, was that they were all either directly referencing VOA’s article or had simply re-posted the VOA article verbatim as their own (one way you know not to trust those particular sites as reliable or credible news sources). Even on the State Department’s website, who, according to the article, would have an alert posted by the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa, had nothing.
This made me begin to question how accurate this article could be. It’s not that I don’t trust VOA. Honestly, I couldn’t say whether I trust them or not. I had never heard of them before Sunday night. They’re supposedly credible and reliable. So, there’s that. But I couldn’t help but find it to be extremely strange that no one else on the web was carrying this information independent of VOA.
Then there was the article itself. Some of the numbers just weren’t adding up based on the research I’ve been able to conduct on adoptions in Ethiopia. The article claimed they were processing 50 adoptions a day? If you just assume a four-day-work-week that would be over 800 adoptions a month, and I knew that wasn’t accurate. So, I was really choosing to believe this article was a fluke. That someone had jumped the gun and stirred up a frenzy of anxiety that was unwarranted.
As I more or less wrote off the article, though, I had to ask myself why I was so eager to do so. Sure, it would mean that our wait for a child from Ethiopia would be extended for quite a while possibly resulting in us looking for a different program. But the steps MOWA (Ethiopia’s Ministry of Women’s Affairs) was taking were to assure that children were no longer trafficked, and wasn’t I for that?
Of course I was. I am. That’s one of the reasons I believe adoption should be hard, so that it discourages people who would harm children from pursuing it. However, I believe we’re at a point in our adoption journey right now where we wish it was just a little bit easier. We’re tired and frustrated with ourselves and how long we’re taking. I won’t speak for Liza, but I will say that I believe that Haven is out there right now somewhere. As his or her father I am going to fight to bring him or her home, but I feel guilty that I’m not fighting enough or that I am quickly and easily overwhelmed by obstacles both expected and unexpected. My reaction to this news was personal. Honestly, I wasn’t thinking about the children who might be trafficked (though I should have been). I was only thinking of my child, Haven, and how I couldn’t (I can’t) stand the thought of not getting him or her home any sooner than we can already.
At any rate, we received word from Bethany yesterday that, among other things, let us know the following:
Our understanding is that, at this time, there have been no official decisions made by MOWA regarding the number of adoptions they will approve per day. The opinion of many stakeholders is that MOWA will not proceed with the plan mentioned in the [VOA] article.
So… that’s good news. At the very least it has calmed some of my present anxieties.
Please continue to pray, though.
Pray for Ethiopia and the leaders there.
Pray for her children, that they will all be cared for and fought for well.
Pray for parents who are adopting from there.
Pray for Ethiopian mothers and fathers who are working tirelessly to provide for their children so that adoption never needs to be a possible solution for them.
Pray for an end to human trafficking everywhere.
Pray for us.
Pray for Haven.
Thanks.