Misunderstandings plague African adoptions
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 who adopted 4-year-old Abednego and renamed him Mikolaj say the procedure was fully legal, took six months and involved Polish diplomats who spoke with the birth parents. Rioba acknowledges that 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 thought 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 that lawyer after lawyer declined to take her case, and that 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, said that she and her husband quarreled over giving up the child and separated, and that she had not been told of any contact with her son. Repeated efforts to reach her husband by phone for comment were unsuccessful.
The Polish father, who declined further interview requests, requested anonymity to protect the boy's privacy. He said he took e-mails bearing Rioba's name at face value, without checking to see whether they were written by her. Rioba said she bore 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, said Nairobi-based UNICEF expert Margie de Monchy, who has spent decades working on child protection issues. Unlike in adoptions, the child remains in regular contact with the parents.
