How child traffickers are exploiting the poor and unsusecting

from: www.sfgate.com

Adoption reforms too late to reunite Kenyan mom, son

Katharine Houreld, Associated Press

Sunday, March 2, 2008

(03-02) 04:00 PST Mombasa, Kenya --

The offer of a foreign education for her beloved youngest son seemed like a dream come true for Elizabeth Rioba. But the Kenyan mother says a family member tricked her into signing adoption papers, and now it's been five years since she's seen her boy.

The Polish couple that adopted 4-year-old Abednego and renamed him Mikolaj says the procedure was fully legal, took six months and involved Polish diplomats who spoke with the birth parents. Rioba acknowledges she signed papers, but says she did not understand them.

Child protection experts say such tragic misunderstandings are common in a part of the world where adoption is a foreign concept. Criminals can exploit the gap between wealthy Westerners who genuinely want to help and poor Africans who want to do the best they can for their children.

Speaking in her Kenyan coastal village of mud huts, baby chickens scuttling between her feet, Rioba said she believed the couple was taking her son to Poland for schooling and would bring him to her on holidays.

"Instead of bringing him back, they said the child was theirs," she said, surrounded by relatives and friends who nodded sympathetically. She said lawyer after lawyer refused to take her case, and the one who did wanted $1,600. "I started paying, but ran out of money so I had to give up," she said.

In an e-mail to the Associated Press, the Polish adoptive father said he was in e-mail contact with Rioba and her husband, and had sometimes assisted them financially. But Rioba, who speaks poor English and has no phone or electricity, says she and her husband quarreled over giving up the child, separated, and she has not been told of any contact with her son. Repeated efforts to reach her husband by telephone for comment were unsuccessful.

The Polish father, who declined further interview requests, requested anonymity to protect the boy's privacy. He says he took e-mails bearing Rioba's name at face value, without checking to see if they were written by her. Rioba said she bears no ill will toward the Polish couple, instead blaming the relative who misled her about the process and who she suspects made money from it.

There's no word for adoption in Rioba's Swahili language. It is common for Africans to send orphaned or impoverished children to live with richer relatives, says Margie de Monchy, a UNICEF official in Nairobi who has spent decades working on child protection issues. Unlike in adoptions, the child remains in regular contact with the parents.

Monchy says networks of traffickers are exploiting this confusion between African custom and Western concepts of adoption.

"It's calculated, it's organized and anecdotal evidence suggests it's increasing ... throughout the region," she said, noting that no official statistics of African adoptions are maintained.

Monchy says celebrities such as Madonna may have unwittingly contributed to the problem by raising interest in African adoptions. The singer is in the process of adopting a Malawian boy whose mother died but whose father is living.

"Why did Madonna have to go for a child with a father? Why couldn't she support the father to take care of the son?" Monchy asked. In October, six French aid workers were stopped in Chad with 103 children they said were Darfur orphans being taken to foster families in France. Most of the children were found to be Chadians with living parents or other adult caregivers, and Chadian parents said they had been told the children were going to be enrolled in a new school in Chad, not taken out of the country.

The aid workers, from a group called Zoe's Ark, were convicted of kidnapping and sentenced to eight years in jail with hard labor by a Chadian court in December, a sentence that was commuted to eight years in jail when they were transferred to France under a judicial agreement. Months later, the children involved were being cared for in a Chadian orphanage, their return to their families complicated in part because Zoe's Ark had not maintained records on them. Zoe's Ark officials say local intermediaries assured them the children were orphans.

In Kenya, the head of Children's Services, Ahmed Hussein, said new rules took effect in 2005 requiring parents to be given clear explanations about the meaning of adoption.

Nevertheless, his agency still sees several cases a year of parents unaware that they are giving up their children permanently. In such cases, the agency intervenes to stop the adoptions, he said.

The reforms are too late for Rioba, who weeps when she looks at pictures of her lost son.

Some mornings when she sits shucking corn into a plastic bucket between her feet, she looks at the muddy path leading into the village and imagines her boy walking home, tall and proud.

"Maybe he would talk Polish, walk like the Polish. ... He's 9 now. I don't even know if he would remember me," she said.

And would she recognize him today? "Of course," she says simply. "I would never forget."