The economics of a little boat

The story told about adoption in the international adoption literature is usually an old style imperialist one in which the U.S. figures as an unregenerate exploiter of the Third World.



That story has always offended me. Part of my reaction to it, I suppose, is that Kristina and I are international adopters. But part of it is also that it seems so transparent a rationalization of abandonment. The power and wealth of the U.S. are assumed to be so supreme that even though years in an orphanage may separate a child's abandonment from the child's adoption, the one is treated as compelled by the other.



Nevertheless, there are points of truth to the story. And as much as I don’t want Maia to see herself as having been torn from her birth family by imperialist marauders, neither do I want her to think of herself as having needed to be rescued by us from the indifference of her blood kin.



Either way lies seeing oneself as a victim—an entirely avoidable result, by my reckoning, because neither story is true.








When we adopted Maia, the director of the orphanage—who controlled who would be candidates for adoption—made it quite clear that she didn't much care for Americans. She was willing to deal with us for practical reasons. But she also made it clear that she would drive a hard bargain.








The first child we saw had a large tumor behind his ear. This was not apparent initially. We had to take the bonnet off his head to see it. That wasn't that great a concern, frankly. What was of concern, though, were the small chin, the dropped ears, the space between the eyes, and the unpredictable arching of the back that we had learned were signs of fetal alcohol syndrome.






Beer is very cheap in Kazakhstan. As I recall, a liter bottle was something like 30 or 40 cents U.S., and you could see young men walking down the street drinking the tall bottles as early as 10 in the morning.








What is the cost to the state of a single individual with fetal alcohol syndrome? I found a 2000 study that estimated the cost at $5,000,000 in the U.S. Assuming that Nikolai did have fetal alcohol syndrome, it would have been a coup for the director, her orphanage and her nation, if she had succeeded in shifting the costs of that child to us and our country. Can’t blame her for trying.



Directly after our meeting with Nikolai—and I mean, in the first seconds after Nikolai had been reclaimed from us—our "handlers" placed enormous pressure on us to say, yes, to adopting him. We resisted for purely selfish reasons—we were not willing to take on the enormous task of raising a child with fetal alcohol syndrome.

So we told them that we had to think about it.







It was not a happy ride home to the hotel. Our handlers' true interests were aligned with the director's, not ours, because they needed to close the deal to get paid and were reluctant to put pressure on the director to offer a different child to us. It was the director that they had to deal with on a recurrent basis, not us. Although they truly did seem to like us, we would never be more than a one-time meal ticket for them.



“Close the deal,” “offer”—I could write this in a way that would avoid terms like that, but, in truth, this was a transaction. A deal.

First thing the next morning, there was sharp rapping at our hotel room door.

Two agitated handlers, with drawn faces.

They cajoled, ridiculed, were indignant, were incensed, were our friends, our sisters, who, by turns, expressed their fervent desire to do their best by us and their deep and abiding hurt and disappointment that we had so injured them by spurning Nikolai.







Somewhere in here we were shown another child. This girl was about 5. Again, there was something deep and irreparably wrong. She seemed emotionally and mentally stunted in some fundamental way. In the time that she was with us, we might as well have been sitting next to a pensioner recalculating her month's budget.

By email, we communicated with the adoption agency in our State. We wanted them to help us. They communicated with our handlers, who, in turn, apparently communicated with the director of the orphanage.



There was hell to pay the next day. We got it first from our handlers and then from the director of the orphanage who told us, basically, that we were ingrates. The great country of Kazakhstan had given us the opportunity to adopt a child and here we were, rejecting the two wonderful children that they had offered to us.









I know this game, so I agreed that Kazakhstan was a wonderful country and apologized that the resources of our family were so limited that we could not have provided an adequate home for the first two children she had shown to us and so would have done a disservice to her and to them by adopting them. I apologized in advance if it turned out that the resources of our family were so limited that they would not permit us to adopt any child from the orphanage.








I think this amused her. At any rate, her mood changed before she opened the doors to reveal what she had indicated would surely be our last opportunity.



The doors did open, someone held Maia out to us, and I lost my heart to the frightened little face that appeared there.

From then on, it was a done deal, although there was a lot of second guessing and a great deal of counseling from those who love us not to commit to a child with such a serious problem.

No matter. Like I say, it was a done deal.

I’ve tried to wrap myself around the economics that pushed Maia to us and us to Maia, but they remain elusive. I just have some thoughts.





The most important ones concern Maia’s birth family.



Maia, as you know, is missing an ear. I learned from our handlers that Kazakhstan is a bride price society. “Bride price” is the reverse of “dowry”—it means that the groom’s family must pay the bride’s family for the bride. Of course, the bride isn’t actually “purchased,” but, nonetheless, there is a transaction involved, and it is a significant expense.





When Maia was born, she had two older brothers. The family history says that they were normal. Maia’s mother was a doctor (probably meaning a midwife or nurse practitioner), and her father was an engineer.

Maia’s deformity probably represented economic disaster for them. They were looking at having to make two large payments for wives for their sons in order to get them married well in this society, and they were never going to recover their investment in their sons or in Maia's upbringing on the bride price that they would get for Maia. And who knew what the medical costs would be for the missing ear.





When Maia’s natural parents wrote their "refuse letters," explaining why they were abandoning her, they cited the ear. And though they did not provide details on its significance, I think it could only have been economic.



There were economic reasons, too, for why the director of the orphanage put Maia in front of us. As beautiful and bright a little girl as she was, Maia was a liability for her as well. No one in Kazakhstan was likely to adopt her—the economics would have been the same for them as for Maia’s natural parents. So Maia represented a permanent cost to the director of the orphanage because she was always going to burden the orphanage's budget. And then that of the next orphanage in the system, when she left the "Baby House," and so on. Consequently, if the director could get her adopted by an American family, so much the better.




How much did the orphanages and Kazakhstan gain by shifting Maia's costs to Kristina and me? The answer is certainly quantifiable, but it’s beyond my skill. Including education, half a million to a million will go into Maia’s upbringing here. Another hundred thousand, at least, will go into work on creating an outer ear, and fixing teeth and other medical issues associated with the congenital problem. How much of that can be counted as a savings for Kazakhstan? I don’t know—maybe a hundred thousand? Two? Something on that order at least would be required to institutionalize a child for 15 to 18 years in orphanages in Kazakhstan.



And what was our economic motive, mine and Kristina's? We had wealth—resources, anyhow—that had no purpose, lives that had not really led anywhere. In my case, at least. And like the director, we bargained, too, avoiding adoptions that would have entailed economic and emotional costs that were too high for us. If economics put Maia in front of us, economics also kept us looking until we found her.

Maia has brought more to us than I can say. Love, a certain joy that comes only from a child. Purpose. Taking care of her, making sure that she’s safe, and well, and learning things, and loved. They say that adopters are the big winners in adoption, and I can't deny that. Whatever the cost, it is far exceeded by the benefit. In our case, at least.

And as for Maia herself? I hope she comes to see that none of the adults in this piece were villains, actuated though we might all have been, to some degree, by economic and otherwise selfish motives. If the institution of adoption requires change, that change cannot come at our level but would have to come at a societal one. Else, the moment of decision will repeat—that moment in which a couple like us lose their hearts to a face like Maia's and realize that they cannot leave that face and the little being behind it, behind.

I think of Maia’s birth mother from time to time. I picture her as a religious woman, who faced a Sophie’s choice when Maia was born—does she sacrifice her sons for her daughter or her daughter for her sons? Trusting that Allah is merciful, she set her little Fatima’s boat adrift, hoping that it would come to berth in a good place.

We will find her someday and show her that her faith was not unjustified.

(These pictures are a chronology of our adoption of Maia. It starts at the orphanage in Shymkent; the picture of the train (called, the Spanish train) is the one we took to Almaty to have Maia examined; the next pictures were from the train ride back to Shymkent. Then comes the adoption--the man with the hat in the bad photo towards the middle is the Judge who presided. More pictures of Shymkent and the park across the street from our hotel; then the trip to Almaty and pictures there, mostly in our hotel room and of the park across that street. I think I liked Shymkent the most--it was raw and elemental. You see Maia holding things in her mouth in some of these pictures because that's how she used to keep up with things. A problem in the orphanage, I think, is that once you put anything down, someone else might pick it up. So you didn't, if you could avoid that.)

John, Monday, January 15, 2007