the Christian orphan care movement

I recognize that orphanage life is the only option for some children.  However, I think that the overabundance of churches that are building orphanages are harmful in a number of ways:

1. They are taking in poverty orphans. I will say it again: a child should not have to be abandoned at an orphanage to receive aid. If we can feed and educate a child in an orphanage, we can feed and educate a child living at home.

2. They are focused on providing a destination to missions groups. It’s sad to say this, but I’ve heard it from numerous people: the church wants to build an orphanage so they can visit and “love on” orphans when they take short-term trips. NO, PEOPLE. No no no no. Orphans are not mission-trip props.

3. They are motivated by the romanticism of starting an orphanage and how heroic that will make them look. People want their name on the building. It motivates people to donate when they feel ownership. Opening an orphanage looks good on paper. I get it. Still not best practice.

4. They are failing to provide adequate supervision to at-risk children. Orphanages in third-world countries tend to be poorly staffed, with high child-to-caretaker ratios and a high staff turnover. It is rare than an orphanage in a third-world country would meet even the minimum standards to be a licensed childcare facility in the U.S., and yet we are somehow satisfied with sub-standard care because they are poor.

5. They are not focused on permanency planning or family reunification. I cannot tell you have many orphanages I’ve visited where the children have living parents who even visit on weekends and there is absolutely no plan in place to get the kids back home.

6. They are raising children to be ministry partners instead of psychologically healthy adults. I have often heard orphanage directors talk about how they are raising the “future generation of Christian leaders” by raising kids in an orphanage. Except that our goal for kids should be to raise them into adults with a healthy sense of self . . . and the best way to do that is in a family, not in a “future Christian leader warehouse.”

Read more: http://www.rageagainsttheminivan.com/2013/09/how-christian-orphan-care-movement-may.html#ixzz4kkptwF00

Adoption Ethics by Jen Hatmaker

http://jenhatmaker.com/blog/2013/05/14/examining-adoption-ethics-part-one

I so want this to not be true, but I keep hearing it over and over in Ethiopia, Haiti, Uganda, Congo, everywhere. The missionaries and locals are saying something very disturbing: so often vulnerable birth moms are coerced and misled, families are manipulated and deceived, children are flat out bought. International adoption is Big Business. I’ve read emails describing orphanage directors who paid $20 for birth certificates and $75 to take a baby right out of his mother’s hands. Paperwork is falsified and birth families are told their children are going to school, to triage while they stabilize, to receive health care then return home.

There are very real orphans all over the earth, but most of us don’t pursue the kids there are; we pursue the kids we want, and these countries know the score. Older kids stay on waiting children lists, while the baby line is hundreds deep. It doesn’t take long for opportunists to figure this out.

Here are the real numbers: Around the world, there are an estimated 153 million orphans who have only lost one parent (“single-orphaned”). Obviously, not all these children need adopted. Most single parents raise children valiantly in their own community and extended family. There are about 18 million orphans who have lost both parents (“double orphaned”) and are living in orphanages or on the streets. So again, I am pro-family: first families when possible, and second families when they are not.

It is simply this: the line for adoptable healthy babies is very long, and every last one of them will be chosen, even those not born yet. In the meantime, tens of thousands of older kids are waiting right this second. Unicef reports approximately 95% of orphans over the age of 5. So if our motivation includes mitigating the orphan crisis, then we need more parents willing to adopt older kids, sick kids, and sibling groups, including here and abroad.

For those considering adoption, let’s discuss due diligence. Internationally, perhaps the primary consideration is which country. Why? Certain countries lend themselves to a more transparent process with less room for corruption. Others facilitate adoptions with virtually NO oversight by a child welfare authority, and the U.S. government has a limited role, so there is almost no process for verifying practices as ethical, which isn’t to say that they are corrupt, it’s to say that nobody has a clue if they’re corrupt.

PAPs (prospective adoptive parents) must research the adoption process in a country, specifically how a child is determined to be available for international adoption. Call multiple agencies, read the DOS website, talk to adoptive families that have gone through the process. In general, Hague Convention Countries have more safeguards in place than non-Convention countries (exceptions apply). In general, the more the foreign country’s government controls the process (especially the matching process) instead of an agency, attorney or orphanage, there is less room for corruption. Although frustrating, the slower and more thorough a country is, the better. If they place a premium on reunification and in-country placements and insist on exhaustive investigations to approve an international placement, we say AMEN and commit to wait.  

Second, with such enormous trust placed in agencies as mediators, this is no place for naivety. Once you’ve chosen a country, next find an agency with best practices in that country, because an agency has different levels of experience, staffing, knowledge and resources in every country they work, even if they run multiple programs.

Although this varies from country to country, some general questions to ask of agencies:

• Are you licensed and accredited both here and in the other country? (You might think this was obvious, but you would be wrong.)
• Has your license ever been suspended in country X? Any other country?
• Can you recommend other agencies that work in the same country? (This speaks volumes, including their reputation with other sound agencies.)
• Can you provide references of families who have adopted from your agency from the same country? (Not foolproof, because anyone can assemble a band of cheerleaders, but it’s a start. This list should be lengthy.)
• How long have you been working in country X? (Pilot programs give me serious pause; it is simply not proven, and this is no place for naive optimism.)
• How many adoptions do you facilitate each year? (Beware of astronomical numbers.)
• How many of the kids you place from county X are infants? How many have special needs? How many are older?
• Can we see a copy of a recent audited financial statement? Annual report?
• How does the referral process work?
• Do any of your staff get paid on a per adoption basis? If no, then how are they paid?
• What are the common reasons children are available for adoption in country X?
• Will the children likely have living birth parents? If so, are we allowed to interact with them? What will we learn from them?
• Can we use an independent or second translator when talking to birth parents? (This diminishes the possibility of selective mistranslation by an orphanage employee and allows you to ask difficult and pressing questions about what they actually understand about international adoption. What have they been promised? Are they under the impression that this is temporary? Were they approached about adoption or did they relinquish voluntarily? Etc…)
• Who in country X determines that the children are appropriate for adoption?
• Does your agency interact with the birth parents?
• Do you have initiatives in place for reunification or first family development, not associated with adoption revenue?
• For domestic adoption:  What does the birth parent get from your agency? Who is providing counseling? What options are presented by your agency?

Red flags for PAPs:

• When you ask questions, do you feel shut down, disrespected, bullied, or discouraged? I asked my agency hard questions and got pages and pages of immediate, thorough responses. If you are discouraged from talking to other families, researching, asking difficult questions, or investigating, RUN.
• Are other adoptive families with concerns are painted as lunatics or troublemakers?
• Does correspondence lean too heavily on emotional propaganda and “rescue” rhetoric, as opposed to professionalism and an obvious commitment to best practices?
• An agency that offers something different than other agencies.
• An agency that only does infant adoptions or promises lots of babies.
• An agency that offers the same thing for much less money.
• An agency that offers the same thing as other agencies in much less time.
• An agency that claims to have special connections or processes in country.
• If you hear the word “expedited,” run for the hills. That is not a thing. That is corruption.
• Payments without receipts (common in Eastern European adoptions).
• “In general, if it smells fishy, don’t eat it…” Ryan Hanlon, folks. We cannot allow Baby or Child Fever to overtake our instincts. If your gut senses a red flag, YOU ARE PROBABLY RIGHT.

Red flags for agencies in terms of in-country partners:

• Seeing the same situation in lots of kids’ paperwork (e.g. all the kids are abandoned or all the kids have parents’ deceased; or the same police officer signed off on the abandonment recognition, or the same hospital worker or social worker, etc. is involved in all the cases.)
• An orphanage partner who wants money off the books.
• An orphanage partner who can provide much more than anyone else.
• In-country staff or partners who prevent international staff from accessing or communicating with any relevant parties.
• Not experiencing the same challenges as other agencies (unless the reasons are obvious).

To that end, what better response than working to preserve (or reunite) first families where poverty or disempowerment is an orphan-maker? Preventing or repairing a tragedy of this magnitude is holy work. When we come alongside our brothers and sisters vulnerable to economic despair, empowering and equipping them to raise their own children, we partake in something sacred.

There are fundamental building blocks of community development that provide first families the tools to parent and thrive:

• Prenatal/maternal health
• Basic health care/immunizations
• Clean water
• Education for all kids, especially girls
• Child sponsorship
• Birth control/family planning education
• Community education directed at men re: valuing women and children
• Sustainable employment
• Microfinance
• Business training
• Drying up the donation pipeline (gifts that help instead of hurt)
• Suitable housing
• Agricultural finance
• Reforestation
• Supporting local churches as distribution and development centers

The connective thread between these social constructs and orphans is monumental. Hear this: if you work toward any of the above-mentioned initiatives, you are absolutely protecting children, refusing to “grind the faces of the poor.” THIS COUNTS. For example, in Haiti last fall with Help One Now, Chris Marlow explained the underbelly of donations. After years of exporting subsidized US rice to alleviate hunger in Haiti, virtually all the local rice farmers were driven out of business and the entire economy was undermined. The leap to orphanhood is so short from there.

A growing body of global research confirms that where women and children are valued and educated, poverty is mitigated. Throwing our weight behind initiatives that empower women and educate children is one the single most effective ways to affect the orphan crisis, as it lifts entire communities out of poverty, alters the ethos of regional patriarchy, and serves as orphan prevention. (If you haven’t read Half the Sky, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Their research behind the oppression and empowerment of women is a marvel.)

Business initiatives that train and employ vulnerable adults have clear and lasting implications for family preservation, too. With organizations like Noonday employing women in nine different countries, and TechnoServe which provides free business consulting services in developing countries, and Making Cents International, a nonprofit in Washington that creates entrepreneurship courses for the disadvantaged and trains locals to teach them, cycles of poverty are broken and the economic stimulus affects entire communities.