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A post I wrote last week inspired comments having to do with separating the issue of poverty from any equation that might mean adoption.
Hunger and malnutrition are a huge problem all over Africa and the rest of the developing world. However, it doesn’t mean these kids are not with family that care for them and love them.
In most cases, these families are attempting to keep it together. They are still sending them to school… they are trying! These kids are not in the streets or in orphanages. Their families haven’t given them up. That is why they are not available for adoption.
This is, of course, the case, and by the millions families are stepping up to take in more and more of the children left behind by relatives. This is not only tradition, but a vital necessity, as other structures do not exist to care for all these children at any level.
In Africa, as in other ‘developing nations’, people in need outnumber people able to contribute by a huge margin. The issues are overwhelming, the problems grow worse by the year, and successive generations come of age under conditions ancestors could never have imagined and take them as normal.
One of the most glaring examples is Kibera, the largest slum in Africa.
Kibera began as a settlement for Nubian soldiers. Then, it sat in a forest outside Nairobi. Now it stretches alongside the highway, mile after mile, and there is no break between it and the rest of the city as it bleeds out from its center.
It’s famous, and the most studied of all slums, being so huge and so handy, well within reach of all sorts of NGO headquarters … the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) is barely a stone’s throw away, in fact.
No one really knows how many people live in Kibera, but the numbers are usually thought to be somewhere between 600,000 and 1.2 million people. The slum itself is about 3/4th the size of Central Park in NYC.
Fully one fifth of the huge population of people living with AIDS in Kenya are in Kibera, and under any circumstance it is an unhealthy place. Crime is rampant, tribal conflict is common, and open sewers assure that disease is always likely.
This story from Reuters puts rather a fine point on the realities families in Kibera taking in orphaned relatives face daily, focusing on grandmothers … some of whom are HIV+ themselves … struggling to raise the children of their children and their children’s children.
Putting a hopeful spin on the efforts of these grandmothers, the article suggests that, without them, “many more orphans in Kibera and elsewhere would end up as glue-sniffing street children or child prostitutes.”
True, but many end up that way even with grandmothers straining to do what they can. Life is brutal in Kibera, and a sick, old woman has a very hard time coming between children who should be beginning to look after her and the real world they live in.
Whether or not one would agree that extreme poverty should never be a reason for adoption, I would hope some, at least, would acknowledge that it should never be held as a reason against.
For information on international adoption from Kenya, see the US State Department site on the country.
I would love to adopt from Kenya, my son is Kikuyu, but from what I hear the time parents must be in country is like 6 mons.
I hope they shorten that time frame.
I have 3 African children. My first was orphaned when he was 11. He Grandparents could not support him and asked me to take him. They are actively in our lives (though we no longer live in the same country).
The last two were living in Orphanages when I met them. Their stories are hard to hear, and the kids have been through things so child should have to go through.
Orphanages are everywhere here in Africa. Sure families try to keep their relatives, but with the poverty and amount of children orphaned due to AIDS they cannot take them all in.
I’d proud of my family, I love my boys. But in creating my family 6 people died, if these boys could have their birthparents or relatives that could afford them I’d give them back in a heart beat (oh I’d miss them). But this is Africa and our reality is different parents keep dieing, and poor people cannot keep taking in family they don’t have the financial capacity.