The lessons of Idah's long journey from Malawi to Burlington
Foreign Adoption
The lessons of Idah's long journey from Malawi to Burlington
11-year-old Idah, in traditional Malawi dress, in the den of her family's Burlington home.
With their four-year legal battle to adopt from Malawi, Ontario family paved the way for Madonna to do the same. But their stories have sparked fierce debate, as activists worry these cases are flouting the country's laws
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Geoffrey York
Mchinji, Malawi — From Monday's Globe and Mail, Sunday, Jun. 21, 2009 10:36PM EDT
Before Madonna, before the hype and the fury over her Malawian babies, there were the Clementinos of Burlington, Ont.
The global spotlight never fell on the Clementinos. Nobody heard of their long struggle to adopt a little girl named Idah from Malawi.
But their victory, after a four-year, $35,000 legal battle, was a precedent that paved the way for the U.S. pop superstar to adopt a pair of children from the same African country. Their story raises the same awkward issues – of poverty and culture, of deciding what is best for a child's future, and for the future of a country.
Children like Idah – and Madonna's far more famous David and Chifundo – have sparked a fierce debate in Malawi, where activists worry that the phenomenon of foreign adoption is creating a commercial value for their children, and diverting financial resources that would be better spent on health and education.
But for her adoptive parents in Burlington, who have never been to Malawi, the issue is simpler. By removing Idah from the austere existence of an African orphanage, they believe they are giving her the nurturing that she needs to have a chance in life.
“We're not trying to remove Idah from her culture, but to give her an opportunity,” says Jane Clementino, a management consultant and mother of three other children. “We're doing it for the good of the child. If you can make a difference, why wouldn't you?”
Idah, whose birth name is Effina Chulu, is now a lively 11-year-old Grade 5 student and cross-country running champion at a school in Burlington, an outer suburb of Toronto. Last month she became a Canadian citizen, the culmination of a six-year effort by Jane and Carlo Clementino.
Like Madonna, the Clementinos persuaded a court to let them bypass a law that requires them to be a “resident” of Malawi if they want to adopt a Malawian child. As a result, Idah became one of the first children in the country to be adopted by foreigners.
Children's rights groups are worried that these cases are making nonsense of their country's laws. In the past few years, they say, hundreds of children have been quietly removed from Malawi in violation of the national law and its clear requirement that only residents of the country can adopt.
But for the parents in Canada, the law is a bureaucratic obstacle that needs to be streamlined so that more children can be adopted by foreign families. With adoption in China becoming more difficult, a growing number of Canadians are turning to Africa.
Idah's journey, like that of Madonna's adopted son, David Banda, began in a village in Malawi, a small landlocked country of 13 million people in southern Africa where most people subsist on less than $2 a day.
Both children were considered orphans, although their fathers were still alive. Both were taken to an orphanage called Home of Hope in the ramshackle border town of Mchinji, near the Zambian border.
Idah was the first child to be taken from Home of Hope and brought to a foreign land. A few years later, in an eruption of global publicity, David was the last.
A brick wall surrounds the orphanage, topped by shards of broken glass to keep intruders out. “The Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom,” says a painted slogan on the wall.
Inside the walls are 580 children and the orphanage's founder, Rev. Thomson Chipeta, an 80-year-old Presbyterian minister.
Also inside the orphanage is Idah's father, Patrick, who works here in exchange for the food he needs for his survival. He briefly meets me at a market outside the orphanage, but is reluctant to talk. “If they see me here with you, I'll be in trouble,” he says, before walking away.
There's no evidence that Mr. Chipeta is motivated by commercial factors. A former orphan himself, he seems sincere in his love of the children. Yet money, and a craving for foreign donations, is a recurring theme in almost everything he says to a foreign visitor.
Mr. Chipeta takes me on a tour of the orphanage, ending in a small brick building that bears the painted name “The Fax House to God.” Inside are the remains of a house built by South African missionaries in 1925.
“This is just a simple place where I have a direct line to God,” the minister says. “He provides all our needs.” Then he bows his head in prayer, asking for divine help so that I will publicize his orphanage “to tell many people that we need help.”
He has already given me a brochure with details of how donors can send a bank transfer to the orphanage. Madonna's charity, Raising Malawi, is providing about $300,000 annually to the orphanage, but he says it needs a further $500,000 every year.
Before Madonna came along, Canadians were the main supporters of Home of Hope. The biggest benefactor was a woman named Jane Glaves who raised tens of thousands of dollars for the orphanage from her church and Rotary Club in Brantford, Ont.
The minister calls her “Auntie Jane” and “a great gift from God.” He estimates that she raised $75,000 a year for the orphanage. Its nursery and primary school are named after her.
While he is keen to seek foreign money for the orphanage, Mr. Chipeta is less keen to discuss Madonna's role at his orphanage. “People will think we don't need help,” he says.
Pressed for his opinion on foreign adoption, he calls it a “very difficult question” that only the government can decide. Then he reaches for his Bible for an ancient precedent. “Is it good for a child to be adopted? It goes back to Moses.… The Bible confirms that Moses had a better education because of the family he was brought up in.”
Effina Chulu, one of the first infants brought to the orphanage, was renamed Idah in honour of a daughter of Mr. Chipeta who had died. Bright and friendly, she became a favourite of Ms. Glaves, the Canadian woman who visited the orphanage twice a year.
In 2003, Ms. Glaves decided to take two malnourished boys from Malawi to Canada for medical treatment. Five-year-old Idah was perfectly healthy, but she was brought to Canada as a “companion” for the boys, and was soon in the foster care of the Clementinos. All three of the children were eventually adopted in Canada, and several of the lawyers and officials who helped arrange those adoptions were later instrumental in helping Madonna with her adoptions in Malawi.
Ms. Glaves wrote later that the journey to Canada by the three Malawian children was “God's will” and a way to “teach the world what love is about.”
But activists in Malawi reject the idea that “God's will” is a sufficient reason to send a healthy child to a faraway country.
The huge sums donated by foreigners, especially after a successful adoption, are an incentive for unscrupulous people to set up orphanages for money-making reasons, they say. And the tens of thousands of dollars spent on a single adoption would be much better spent on supporting Malawi's schools and hospitals so that many more children could live healthy lives, the activists say.
Foreign adoption, they say, must only be a “last resort” when there is nobody in Malawi who can take care of an orphan. “The orphanages and the authorities haven't exhausted all the options in looking for places for the children,” says Maxwell Matewere, executive director of Eye of the Child, a Malawian children's-rights group.
“Many orphanages are acting as recruitment agencies,” he says. “They keep on recruiting children to justify their orphanage and to keep raising money. Once you start commercializing the process, the children lose out.”
He estimates that more than 300 children from Malawi have been adopted by foreigners in the past nine years without following the legal rules. Often their families are misled into thinking that the children are going abroad for schooling or medical care and will return home later, he says.
In the case of Madonna's adoptions, the children were given to her essentially as “a token of thanks” for her charitable work in the country, Mr. Matewere says.
In April, a high court in Malawi rejected Madonna's bid to adopt Chifundo, since the singer was not a resident of the country. Ignoring the residency rule “could actually facilitate trafficking of children by some unscrupulous individuals who would take advantage of the weakness of the law of the land,” Judge Esme Chombo ruled.
“Consider the consequences of opening the doors wide. Anyone could come to Malawi and quickly arrange for an adoption that might have grave consequences on the very children that the law seeks to protect.”
The ruling was overturned last week by Malawi's Supreme Court of Appeal, which criticized Judge Chombo for focusing on “some imaginary unscrupulous individuals.” The court said Madonna could be considered a “resident” of Malawi – even though she doesn't actually live in the country – because she has “a targeted long-term presence” with her charitable efforts and her “long-term ideas” of investing in projects to help its children.
Activists worry that this ruling will make it easier for wealthy foreigners to adopt Malawian children in exchange for charitable donations to the country. The definition of “resident” has been bent completely out of shape, they say.
Mavuto Bamusi, national co-ordinator of a Malawian rights group called the Human Rights Consultative Committee, rejects the idea that foreign adoption can be justified as a response to poverty. “If a child is adopted to take her out of poverty, it's like saying that the 13 million people of Malawi should be taken out of poverty – let us vacate the country,” he says.
“Instead of putting one child in a school in London, couldn't the same resources be spread across 15 children in Malawi? The real causes of poverty are not being addressed. Is adoption a sustainable way of protecting children? No.”
Another group, Save the Children UK, argues that foreign adoption can actually worsen the problems that it hopes to solve. “The very existence of orphanages encourages poor parents to abandon children in the hope that they will have a better life,” a spokeswoman said.
Back in Burlington, Jane Clementino sees it differently. She is convinced that Idah would have faced a “dismal” future if she had remained in the orphanage.
Ms. Clementino acknowledges that Idah has extended family in Malawi, including aunts, uncles and adult sisters. “Their intentions are pure, they would love to take care of their own, but they don't have the means,” she says.
“These children are in an orphanage because no one else could take care of them. My understanding is that there's not that many people in Malawi with wealth who are looking to adopt.”
The process of adopting Idah was “long and arduous,” she says. “The path isn't established – there isn't any easy way to do this. The adoption laws and the paperwork aren't easy to understand.”
In fact, if the Clementinos had never met Idah, they might have abandoned the idea of adopting a child from Malawi, she says. “But once you make eye contact, you become invested. It's a different journey.”