The Need For Speed

By Laura Davis

When Kurt and Alison Noyce saw their son for the first time, he stood outside alone amid a plethora of colorful wet clothing hung out to dry. All the other orphans were napping, but he had stayed up because he knew his new parents were coming to get him. Three-year-old Jemburu wore the Red Sox shirt they had sent him.

As soon as little Jemburu spotted his new mom and dad, he ran full speed toward them—and then straight past them, says Alison Noyce with a laugh. Finally, she scooped him up and hugged him tight.

“He kept leaning back to look at us…reaching for Kurt and then back for me,” Noyce says. “He wouldn’t let us interact with any other children. A little girl came over and wanted to hold my hand and I thought he was going to punch her. When we came home, he’d say, ‘Don’t look at my mom, look at your own mom’ in the grocery store. It took several months for him to let his guard down.”

Noyce and her husband have adopted two boys from Ethiopia—Mikias was almost 5 years old when they brought him home, and Jemburu was nearly 4.

“When I first took [Mikias] to the supermarket I thought he was going to pass out!” says Noyce. “He was throwing himself on the produce. I think it was a survival mechanism.”

“I think they were desperate to have this life,” Noyce says.

Four million children, just like Jemburu and Mikias, are orphaned in Ethiopia—around 12 percent of the total child population, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). These children face a host of challenges from the moment they are born. UNICEF reports that malnutrition is the cause of over half of all deaths among children 5 years old and under in Ethiopia, and the number of continually malnourished children remains considerably high despite aid efforts. Easily-treatable illnesses such as dehydration and diarrhea are responsible for roughly 20 percent of deaths in children under the age of 5. And the AIDS epidemic in Africa has hit Ethiopia hard. UNICEF states that half of a million Ethiopian orphans have lost one or both parents to the disease; 120,000 of them are living with HIV themselves.

Jody Britton is the mother of three biological children and one adopted child named Malachi; and she is in the process of adopting a second child. Britton and her husband finally brought Malachi home from Ethiopia when he was just over a year old. He had been found abandoned with no clue as to how old he was or what happened to his family. Judging by his teeth, those at the orphanage guessed he was around 7 months old when found, says Britton.

As more and more people learn about orphans in Ethiopia and the poverty levels they face, the number of Ethiopian adoptions continues to rise. According to the U.S. Department of State, Americans adopted over 2,500 children from Ethiopia last year. That is a 5000 percent increase in just over 10 years. But that number may drop significantly this year because of some legal changes.

To handle the flow, the Ethiopian Ministry of Women’s, Children’s and Youth Affairs (MOWCYA) was established to review each adoption case after the match with prospective adoptive parents, and after the final court’s approval for a new birth certificate and passport for the child.

Cory Barron, director of Children’s Hope International adoption agency, says because the number of adoptions has grown considerably, MOWCYA “didn’t have the resources to do the volume they had coming in—so they limited the number.”

This past March, when officials at MOWCYA announced they would process no more than five adoptions per day, they claimed they were doing so to improve screening methods and to extend their resources to children in need.

As a result, the Joint Council on International Services projected delays in the adoption process amounting to one or more years.

Hollen Frazier, the executive director of All God’s Children International adoption agency, says she hasn’t seen the process slow down that drastically, but waiting periods have increased.

Frazier says it is not yet clear how these changes will affect everyone involved. Families adopting through All God’s Children International this year have experienced between 18 and 24 months for the process to be completed from start to finish. But Frazier says the agency is preparing families to expect longer even though they haven’t seen an extreme delay.

“With the changes, we’ve added an entire year to the process at this time,” Frazier says.

Shortly after MOWCYA’s announcement and in lieu of growing concerns over ethical practices, officials from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services went to Ethiopia to evaluate the Ethiopian adoptions program. While they acknowledge that a single review of the program cannot give definitive results, they concluded that the majority of Ethiopian children adopted by U.S. citizens do, indeed, meet the definitions of orphan and are approved as such. In the briefing issued on April 6, officials at USCIS confirmed that they support the continuation of the inter-country adoption program in Ethiopia and agreed to keep sharpening analysis of each case that comes through the U.S. Embassy in efforts to help MOWCYA’s defense against corruption.

And it seems the Ethiopian government is continuing to make changes on behalf of those efforts. On Aug. 3, the U.S. State Department confirmed the closure of several orphanages in Ethiopia because their practices were not up to MOWCYA standards.

Director Frazier says she “cringes” when she hears news reports of adoption process delays. She says just recently they received a child who had been abandoned shortly after birth and left alone under a tree between two rocks. “The need is huge,” she says.

“There are still orphans in Ethiopia,” says Frazier. ”Any time you say you’re going to just slow the process, that’s not a child-centered approach. To keep them even a day longer—you see that options get minimized and orphans suffer for it.”

With solid processes and requirements in place, along with little proof of fraudulent activity, it may be time to shift the focus toward the other needs of the children—such as proper nutrition, medical care, education, and a sense of belonging. Needs that can be met by waiting families.

Adoption Ministry YWAM-Ethiopia operates four different orphanages in Ethiopia and works with different adoption agencies to place children with families.

Administrator Becky Burns says while her agency welcomes careful scrutiny and concern over ethical adoption processes, children coming from Ethiopia—even the babies— have severe attachment and bonding issues.

“Our main priority is to get them placed,” Burns says.

Noyce, also a popular blogger, can attest to the bonding issues her own sons have from their orphan years. “Some of the children who have been neglected and shut away are so damaged and it’s heartbreaking,” she says.

“Jemberu often makes statements to me that he knows are not true,” She writes on her blog. “Most of them start with variations of…’Remember when I was a baby..’ My response goes something like, ‘Honey, you know I wasn't your Mumma when you were a baby’. Which leads him to say, 'Just pretend'. Then we imagine what he was like together.”

Sometimes bureaucratic decisions leave little leeway for negotiations, but there are other ways families and those interested in Ethiopian adoptions can influence wait times.

Director Barron says other variables—such as requests for a specific age or gender-- affect wait-times as well. “Parents who are more specific wait longer typically,” Barron says. “If a family is open to any child, the waiting periods go down.”

Britton describes her experience when she went to Ethiopia to get Malachi. “I saw firsthand the older kids that had no hope,” Britton says. “You would walk in and have every child pulling and tugging at you calling you mom and dad hoping that you’d pick them.”

In fact, babies are the most likely to get adopted. According to the Adoption Institute, 46 percent of children adopted are less than one year old, and 90 percent of children adopted are under the age of 5. This means that every passing moment lowers the odds of adoption for a waiting orphan.

As an adoptive mother, Noyce advises other child-seeking parents to broaden their criteria for orphans as much as possible.

“People should be open to those waiting,” Noyce says. “Don’t limit yourself. Consider children who are already waiting for families.”

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Do you have a desire to adopt? Why or why not?