AIDS orphans (5) - Adopting Children
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Dear Karen, Osei, John, and All,
Many thanks for your posting(s), and below is an article about adop-
tion which provides some insight (and the info for one agency in the
US) into the issues regarding the adoption of AIDS orphans, specifi-
cally from Africa. This is quite a controversial topic, and I wanted
to clarify what I meant by adoption myself. We at KAIPPG, and most of
the organisations and colleagues we know, believe that it is best to
try to keep children within their own communities and extended-family
structures, and that is what we are hoping to do with a possible fund
which would help folks who otherwise might not have the resources to
adopt within their own communities, because poverty is such a prob-
lem. Some of our women clients, for example, are caring for 7-8
grandchildren or more -- as their own adult children and their
spouses have all died -- and even the children of non-related commu-
nity members. They are older women, sometimes with no education and
no job-skills, and they have often not been able to inherit or claim
the land the live on because of discriminatory inheritance laws,
which are we are trying to get changed.
We are trying to set up a fund to help these women buy title to the
land they live on, and then the land itself, which will give them se-
curity and allow them to farm it for their own nutritional needs and
that of the children, and hopefully develop a surplus for sale. We
are also helping to provide education and skills-training, to intro-
duce micro credit, and to care for the children and youth by develop-
ing educational programs, providing for material needs as we can, and
preparing them for the future with job- and life-skills training.
Many are siblings, and want to stay together, and many adults in the
communities want these children to stay there as well, as long as the
resources can be developed to give them a decent quality of life.
There are some orphanages (themselves controversial), and some chil-
dren who might actually be completely alone and therefore might bene-
fit from adoption outside their community, or even their country. For
the most part, though, there seems to be a consensus that it would be
better for any donor or those wanting to help to strengthen the com-
munities in general to provide funds and other resources so that the
children can stay where they are. Their communities and countries
will have great need of them in future, given the numbers of adults
dying, and social cohesion will be repaired more easily with their
continuing presence. In sum, all of the various ways in which people
might help are worth discussing and implementing (adoption outside
the country being a court of last resort, so to speak, but something
which can be positive under certain circumstances), and it's great to
know that so many people care and want to do something.
With many thanks and all best wishes, and will look forward to a con-
tinuing discussion on this subject,
Janet Feldman
mailto:kaippg@earthlink.net
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This is a good article that summarizes the difficulty in adopting Af-
rican children. The web site is:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/lifestyles/html98/jdl_20000130.html
Also, check out:
http://www.fxb.org and http://www.unaids.org (see p.13 for Family
AIDS Caring Trust)
--
Jerry Large / Seattle Times Staff Columnist
Adopting Africa's AIDS Orphans
Individuals need structure, and so do societies. The framework dif-
fers from society to society, but no society can stand without a sup-
porting structure of some kind. Much of Africa is walking a high wire
between two structures, and it is walking the wire without a net. The
old structure is formed of villages and families, and the new of gov-
ernments and private organizations. One is falling away even before
the other has been raised completely AIDS is tearing away at the
ability of families and villages to support their children. Maybe you
saw the Newsweek cover earlier this month: "10 Million Orphans."
(this article was written in Y2001)
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the AIDS epidemic, which is in-
fecting millions in sub-Saharan Africa and killing 6,000 people a
day. Many of those people are infected in their 20s and die in their
30s, leaving behind young children. A couple of readers asked if I
knew anything about adopting AIDS orphans. I didn't, so I started
asking people who might know and combing through the Web for informa-
tion. Adoption obviously isn't the solution to this problem, but of-
ten when there are natural disasters, wars or other disruptions over-
seas, some Americans respond by adopting children from the area.
Those children at least are helped. This happened with war in the
Balkans, and it happened with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
International adoption is popular.
The U.S. State Department keeps a tally of immigrant visas issued to
orphans coming to the United States, so I looked at the numbers for
the past decade. In 1998, the most recent year listed, there were
4,491 children from Russia, 4,206 from China and 1,829 from Korea.
Most of the top 20 were countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe,
or Asia. The only African country on the list, Ethiopia, sent 96
children to the United States that year. The Web site listed only the
top 21 countries each year, and most years no African country was
listed.
Given the relative difficulty of placing black children in this coun-
try, I wondered whether the numbers meant people were unwilling to
adopt African children. But I know there are Americans who would do
it, so I kept looking. I found that Nigeria makes it difficult to
adopt children internationally and even internally. I called World
Vision in Federal Way and spoke with Silas Kenala, the regional team
leader for World Vision's aid programs in nine countries in Southern
Africa. Kenala was born in Malawi and says that adoption was not part
of the culture. The extended family is expected to care for orphans.
"The problem now is that the productive generation is dying, and that
is putting pressure on grandparents." The Newsweek article used a
World Vision client as an example. AIDS killed 11 of the Ugandan
woman's 13 children, and she was left to care for 22 grandchildren.
Kenala was in Zimbabwe last July and says he saw one cemetery in
which all of the deceased died when they were between 19 and 37. In
Zimbabwe, 25 percent to 30 percent of the population is HIV-positive.
At that one cemetery, he says, there were 20 to 30 new graves in a
week's time. Margaret Schuler works out of World Vision's D.C. office
and is the program officer for Uganda, the country that has done the
most to combat the spread of AIDS. Her group does a lot of work with
AIDS orphans, but she hadn't heard of children being adopted by peo-
ple from other countries. She says that nowadays, "there may be a 13-
year-old child taking care of three or four younger children." Chil-
dren who should be in school have to find jobs, another setback to
themselves and to their countries.
I searched the Web for adoption agencies that mentioned Africa and
found one, All As One, a non-profit organization run by Deanna Wal-
lace Cox. Cox, a Seattle native, grew up in the Northwest and gradu-
ated from Seattle Pacific University. She worked for an organization
that arranged adoptions of Ethiopian children. She noticed the vacuum
in the rest of Africa, so in 1997 she started All As One. "Tradition-
ally in Africa, the extended family has been able to care for the
children, so they don't have a mechanism in place. It is also a mat-
ter of national pride. They want to take care of their own children,"
she said. Even adoption within a country is rare.
"Ethiopia is really the only country up until this year that did any
work with agencies and that has a system for adoption." She has been
working steadily to get laws changed, but the idea of adoption is so
foreign that she has yet to place a child. Just last month she
reached an agreement with the government of The Gambia that will al-
low her to arrange adoptions from that country, her first such ar-
rangement. An agreement with Sierra Leone is a few months away. "The
old system that worked wonderfully before was based on extended fam-
ily," she said, but now "the breadwinners are dying, and also Africa
is becoming more urban." There is a nothing yet to take the place of
the traditional village.
Cox has been working in international adoption for 17 years, and she
has adopted children of her own - Indian, Korean, Ethiopian and Afri-
can American. She says there are fears shared by many developing
countries that make international adoption complicated. "They wonder,
why are we sending our children out of our country? Are they going to
be slaves? Will they just be used?" She suspects, too, that adoption
organizations haven't pushed for adoptions from Africa. "A lot of
adoption facilitators go into Eastern Europe or South America before
they would go to Africa," she said. Some of them may fear Americans
would be racist, but she says that isn't the case. She has had a num-
ber of inquiries since she put All As One on the Web.
Kenala makes frequent visits to Africa, so I asked him how people are
dealing with the crisis. He said people are not weighted down by de-
spair. "There is a feeling that, yes, we can do it," he said. "There
is hope." He also said that as poor countries, there are things that
are out of their control. Often they are at the mercy of powerful
countries that control international finances and whose companies
control drug costs. The Africans will have to rebuild their social
structures themselves, and he noted many examples of them doing just
that. They will have to find new ways to care for orphaned children,
and if we can't just yet become parents to an African child, we
should find new ways to become brothers and sisters to all Africans
at this difficult time.
If you are interested in learning more, or helping, you can contact
World Vision at +1-253-815-1000. All As One can be reached at +1-
209-538-8540, or on the Web at http://www.all-as-one.org .You can
reach Jerry Large c/o The Times, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111.
Phone: +1-206-464-3346. Fax: +1-206-464-2261.
Copyright � 2000 The Seattle Times Company
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