Human Traffic 2: Ethiopia's Baby Trade

The going rate for a baby in Ethiopia is $10,000USD, through legal channels. I’m not sure what a black market baby will run you. It’s sometimes hard for me to wrap my head around a baby with a price tag.

Pioneered by Angelina, this new wave of international adoption is in your face. Madonna is plastered all over CNN with her problems trying to adopt a Malawian baby. Spoof news magazine The Onion features a story with the headline “Angelina Jolie Coming for Your Baby” and the Jolie-Pitt family is steadily increasing its international brood. Here in Addis Ababa, a new flock of mostly American adopters takes over the Hilton and Sheraton hotels every 6 months, staying a week before exporting their new children back to the West.

Perhaps I sound overly harsh, and as an adoptee myself, I can’t be completely critical of the adoption industry. Certainly, there’s a crisis of orphans here in Africa, with the scourge of Aids leaving thousands of parentless children in terrible conditions with impoverished societies unable to care for them. And the population growth in many of these countries is causing huge developmental problems, such as environmental degradation, food insecurity and dilution of wealth, whereas in the West we need immigration to maintain our population levels. As well, adoption within the West is difficult for families who can’t have children of their own because of massive waiting lists and restrictive bureaucracy.

But it’s important to think about the overall impact of massive adoption from developing countries from a wider perspective. Take, for example, Ethiopia. One of the five poorest nations in the world, Ethiopia faces brain drain of its wealthy and educated, creating hubs of diaspora in places like Washington, D.C. or Edmonton, and undermining the country’s potential for growth. I see mass adoptions to the West in a similar light. By exporting a chunk of the future generation of Ethiopians, we are only addressing the symptoms of the problem and perhaps mining the youth that will carry Ethiopia out of poverty. I also question why the children have to be taken away to the West, when it is entirely possible to successfully sponsor a child (and its community) without taking it away from its society and culture.

I’m not advocating an end to international adoption, because it serves the urgent purpose of providing better lives for children that would otherwise have no opportunity, or worse, would simply rot in orphanages and contribute to the increasing incidence of HIV infection. I’m saying lets look at the long term and try to solve the problems that supply the babies put up for adoption. Lets invest in strategies to eradicate poverty and reduce the prevalence of orphans.

When I look at what $10,000 can do when put to good use here, I am amazed. CPAR would build a rainwater harvesting tank for a school in Ethiopia’s Dibate region that faces chronic water shortages. The direct impact of this investment would address the issue of school absences due to water-related illness and time spent collecting water, mostly by girls. By supporting health and education in this way, CPAR would be building the capacity of the community to lead more productive lives, reducing the factors that lead to HIV/AIDS and orphanhood. $10,000 could build five water tanks in five different communities, impacting approximately 1000 students directly, and many others indirectly.

I might adopt a child from Africa or Asia when I’m ready to be a mother. But if I do, I’ll make sure that I simultaneously contribute to addressing the development issues facing the country in the hopes that in the future, the country will be able to take care of its own young. And I’ll ensure that the child I’m adopting doesn’t have any other option, that its family hasn’t seen an opportunity in the demand for babies and sold its baby into adoption to make ends meet.

Until then, I will still get a little edgy when the doorman at the Hilton kindly leans over and asks me, “Where is your Ethiopian baby?”

Human Traffic: Ethiopia's Sex Trade

Something that constantly throws me off guard here in Ethiopia is the sex trade. I have been to Cuba where there is constant pressure to contract a “friend for a day”, or on Jarvis Street near College where women of the night walk around in shoes that defy gravity. But it’s nothing like here. The Ethiopian sex trade has found itself into every nook and cranny of society, and it’s basically accepted (maybe not the individual sex trade workers, but the whole concept of sex trade). And unlike Thailand, it’s not for foreigners and UN employees, but for everyone to partake in…even the poorest of the poor.

There is no need for an Addis red light district- one can find prostitutes in clusters on virtually every corner of the city, and of course in the bars. The thing that’s most amazing is the layers of the trade: transactional sex, commercial sex, a job in a local alcohol shop cum brothel, a financially supportive week-long ‘boyfriend’…there are so many ways the trade manifests itself.

Both CPAR and CAPAIDS work against the sex trade, the first in rural communities and the latter in Addis itself, and both of them focus on the implications of the sex trade on HIV/AIDS. This weekend I visited the commercial sex worker income generation activities of CAPAIDS partner, HAPCSO. The women I met come from rural areas seeking work, don’t find it, and then end up working as prostitutes in local alcohol shops. If they have sex without a condom, they make 10birr per trick (about $1!) and with a condom, only about 1birr. HAPCSO has given them training in sewing, leather work, and construction vehicle driving. Now these women are able to support themselves in getting out of the sex trade, and advocate on HIV/AIDS to those that still remain in the brothels. Often, the organization faces resistance as so many community leaders benefit from continued prostitution, but HAPCSO has been lucky to find a Kebele (city neighbourhood) with a supportive leadership and has begun projects there. The next step is to expand projects to reach more of the massive number of sex workers living in Addis.

Third World sex trade is featured in activism, literature and development academics, but I never expected it to find its way into my work, my neigbourhood or my friend group.

The End of Poverty?

I recently read Jeffery Sachs’ The End of Poverty. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but was excited to pick up at development best-seller- not a common combination! While I usually try to avoid non-fiction when I’m not at school or working, and tend to have a fiction addiction, I think TEOP will find its way onto my 2007 top ten list.

The book does a great job of summarizing most of my four year international development degree, from discussions of absolute versus relative poverty, to the best way to address the issues of environment, health, education and livelihoods in the developing world. And Sachs does it in a way that makes development concepts accessible: he looks at development as a ladder, and those facing extreme poverty have not been able to get their feet on even the first rung. Thus, the requirements of aid can be seen as inputs to help that group reach the bottom of the ladder and begin to work their way up. He also brings down the issues to a single number: $75billion dollars a year until 2025, at which point he believes that all human kind could be on the development ladder and extreme poverty would be eliminated. Hence, the End of Poverty!

Situated, as he is, in the heart of American development politics and economics, Sachs was also able to do a good job of explaining the successes and deficiencies of his country’s aid contributions. Like the discussion in the previous post, this has helped to give me a more detailed view of America’s role in the development world, which I find really interesting. He called on a number of American thinkers and activists to give power to his arguments for the potential of the end of extreme poverty. Paraphrasing Martin Luther King, Jr, Sach’s says “The bank of international justice is not bankrupt,” and explains how people like King, Gandhi, and Mandela “transformed the impossible into the inevitable.” While many people think ending poverty is impossible, and that we in the West can't afford it, Sachs is busy making us realize that we can, and we should.

His point is obviously more and better action, which is heralded over and over again by poverty activists like Bono, Angelina Jolie or Bob Geldof. But the good thing about Sachs is that he manages to mainstream his ideas about aid and development, and introduce them in more conservative economic circles than would usually listen to the rockstar rolemodels. In his final "to do list", Sachs calls everyone to “make a personal commitment,” something I believe in very strongly. He ends the book with this quote:

Let no one be discouraged by the belief that there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills- against misery and ignorance, injustice and violence…Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. -- Robert Kennedy

Ethiopian Firsts

I’m still counting the firsts here in Ethiopia: first ride in a mini-bus, first power outage, first week finished. And within my first week was my first weekend. What a good one! On Friday evening I had a restful night, trying to recuperate from a week full of firsts in a strange (but very friendly) landscape. So, I was well rested and up early on Saturday morning, ready for my first attempt at changing money (there are no such thing as lineups in Addis- you just push your way to the closest teller!) After an enjoyable morning exploring the city, I joined one of my coworkers for a drive up Entoto, a mountain overlooking the city. The view wasn’t great, as the weather was rainy and cloudy, but we plan to go up again after the rains stop. On the way down we stopped for “car-service coffee” – you park in front of a café, and the waitress brings the coffee and pastries to your car directly. It’s a great idea, but in practice it’s a bit messy and spilly!

In the evening I met up with a pile of other Canadian interns for dinner and drinks. Among them was Nic, who invited me to spend Sunday at a shelter for street children that his friend established with her NGO, Little Voice of Ethiopia. It was quite a trek to get there- three minibuses, a taxi, and a walk down a very slippery hill – but well worth it! There are six kids there at the moment, and the group is looking to fill the house up with 20 more little bodies. We stayed and played with the children, who are all between 6 and 13, for hours. They enjoyed dancing, memory, dominoes, and especially teaching me the Amharic names for animals and body parts!

This weekend was also the first time I started to see the reality caused by poverty here in Addis. In our drive up the mountain, we passed many women with giant bushels of eucalyptus branches (used for firewood) trudging down the steep incline. They were bent double with the load, and some were pregnant or only young girls themselves. You would never see an Ethiopian man doing the same task, and so I begin to see the gender divide here. At the shelter, amidst smiling and laughing young faces, I realized that these kids have all spent time on the streets and seen things I will never see. For example, one of the girls is there because at 12 she was sent to be married, but because of her desire to continue school and remain independent, she ran away from home.

With each of these firsts, I become more interested in Ethiopia, and happy that I am here with CPAR to work and learn.