Answers, Part I

I just returned from a forty-five minute trip across town to be finger printed by immigration for our adoption. Actually the whole process ended up taking about three hours if you include the drive time out there, the wait to get the finger printing done (not to bad a wait actually), lunch for the kids and then a drive home. The finger printing office was in the worst part of town though. SO all in all, not a very fun trip that took a HUGE chunk out of my day. So I sat down once we got home and read my last post and felt that I could address at least a couple of the issues I raised earlier. If you are an adoption savvy person or an expert on Africa or Ethiopia, please forgive me if I seem to make broad statements that seem obvious. But if you are reading this blog from the perspective I had on adoption or Ethiopia only a few months ago, this should be informative.

Answer to Questions #1, from my personal Ethiopian adoption experience:

1. Adoption is expensive. The question of how much we are going to have to pay to bring home our baby is the #1 question we hear. I don't easily take offense and gladly answer that question truthfully. It is awkward however, when the answer I give is received with raised eyebrows and the response "wow, it's really expensive". I think, "it is also expensive to purchase a mini-van, or a flat screen TV, or to have your house repainted, or to take a really nice family vacation". But I am not "purchasing" my child. And actually, if I were to give birth to a child and I didn't have the most awesome insurance ever, that would also be expensive. I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that the money we are paying towards our adoption is not for someone to drive out into the bush and pluck a child out of it's mothers arms and sell it to us. A very large portion of these fees is for paperwork that insures that that very thing does not happen. For example, there's a homestudy fee that goes towards having a social worker visit your home and interview you and your family, to make sure you have child safety locks on your medicine cabinet and smoke alarms in your kitchen. There is a fee for the immigration paperwork that will allow you to bring a child from another country into the US. There are fingerprinting fees and Visa fees and background check fees...all these fees insure that you are not engaged in child trafficking. Once you have been referred a child, you must then pass court. At court the Ethiopian government does everything is it's power to prove that your child is legally an orphan either due to death or abandonment.

It does not help when someone like say, Madonna, attempts to adopt a child from a country that does not have these policies in place. To many, it may seem that families simply waltz into the these countries and walk out with a child. Believe me, that is not the truth. Obviously, not even for Madonna.

Are there agencies that seem to have less than ethical standards for their international adoptions. YES! But at this point, I really couldn't see how the United States could do any more to make sure that international adoptions are done as safely and legally as possible. I have filled out endless paperwork, been finger printed twice and had two background checks done to make sure I wasn't a criminal or child abuser.

Only a fourth of what we will ultimately pay for our adoption actually goes to Ethiopia for things such as document translation and processing, medical expenses, and orphanage costs.

Has adopting a child from another country become a status symbol for wealthy Americans? If it has then I guess I don't see it. The families I have watched go through this process are not the wealthy elite. In fact the majority of families I see struggle to pay all the costs, sometimes even completely emptying out their saving accounts, doing fund raisers, garage sales... Sadly these families aren't in the public eye. Adopted children aren't Fendi bags or Gucci shoes. They don't have monetary value. To the families that are adopting them these children are priceless, because they are their CHILDREN.