Clearing the Path for Adoption to Grow

This post is part of a series on the cause of orphan care, adoption and social change that I hope to make you as passionate about as I am. You may want to start from the beginning if you’re just joining us. 

We just established the four obstacles that often serve to keep people from freely pursuing adoption, and have slowed the growth of adoption as a partial solution to the global orphan crisis.

While this isn’t an exhaustive list, here are four steps I think we need to take to remove those obstacles, and another four strategies you can use to directly engage in building solutions.

• We need to make it simpler for potential adoptive parents to get started and understand the pros and cons of the three major adoption choices (international, private domestic and foster adoption).
• We need to make adoption less expensive where we can, and help people understand how they can finance the costs if they aren’t personally wealthy. Most people don’t realize there are a number of grant opportunities, zero-interest adoption loans, and a large refundable federal tax credit to support adoption. Cost should never be an obstacle to uniting a waiting child with willing parents.
• We need to make it easier for adoptive parents to get pre- and post-adoption support to learn the parenting skills they will need to make it through tough times, excel in the many good times and develop each precious child to their full potential.
• We need to reform our local foster care systems to work extensively to reunite children with birth parents for a reasonable period of time, and then shift the emphasis to finding permanence for that child – either through intra-family adoption, or adoption by willing foster parents. (I’ve heard some amazing things about the State of Colorado’s efforts to build permanence into their policy and staffing structure.)

What can you do?

There are a number of contributions you can make to be a part of this solution to the global orphan crisis.

• Adopt a child. Many people aren’t sure they have it in them; others are quite willing but just need help with some of the obstacles. Summoning the will to become an adoptive parent is a long-term investment that will reap rich rewards. I speak from experience!
  And while you’re in the process of becoming an adoptive parent, remember to open yourself up to other families who might be thinking about making that leap. As another adoptive parent said, “it’s hard to tell your friends, ‘we still need X to cover our travel costs’ but in asking them to pray with us about our needs, we’re giving them the wonderful opportunity to see God at work in our adoption.”
• Contribute financially to an adoption. When you hear of a family beginning the adoption process, understand the immense expense they are likely undertaking. Ask how you can help. It’s amazing how a little can go such a long way – between grants, gifts and a unique fundraiser my wife designed by sewing “aprons for adoption” – we owed $16,687 for our first adoption and on the day it was due, we had $16,604 in our adoption fund. We didn’t consider that a coincidence, and we were so grateful for the constant generosity of families and friends.
• Adopt a prospective adoptive family. Perhaps you’re not in a position to become an adoptive parent yourself, but you want to go further than just a financial contribution. Could you form a partnership with another family that is considering an adoption, but is worried about whether or not they can pull it off? Perhaps all they need is access to babysitting, or a loan to finance some of the costs, or help starting a college fund for this child. What a joy you will share with that family and that child that you played such a significant part in creating permanence for.
• Support reforms that will establish permanence for children as a top priority. I’m looking forward to the day when local foster care systems and UNICEF all understand the permanence of a family as the best interests of every child. We need to work through our government – local, state and federal officials – to make these policy changes happen. Great progress is being made, but we can’t rest until the work is done.

I hope this set of posts on adoption has made it clear both how important adoption is in fighting the global orphan crisis, and how critical it is to do even more to arrest the causes that transform one child into an orphan every 18 seconds. So that’s where we go next: orphan prevention.

Photo Credit: Andy and Jill Lehman

The Obstacles to Adoption

This post is part of a series on the cause of orphan care, adoption and social change that I hope to make you as passionate about as I am. You may want to start from the beginning if you’re just joining us.

The last post established adoption as a viable solution to the global orphan crisis, but only a partial solution. It’s really important to understand that each child who is adopted would have grown up without the love and permanence of a family otherwise, in almost every case.

In other words, if being orphaned was a medical condition, we need to work on both prevention and treatment, and adoption fits the latter description. We can’t spend all of our time on orphan prevention and ignore the children in need of permanence today.

So how do we dramatically grow the impact of adoption on the global orphan crisis? I see four key obstacles that need to be knocked down.

1. Adoption is intimidating to plan

Getting started in the journey of adoption is really tough for many people. I remember the feeling of being completely lost and not knowing exactly where to start – and I was already a part of a family that had adopted! There are three major types of adoption – international, private domestic and foster – and there are pros and cons to each choice.

2. Adoption can be expensive to finance

The costs to adopt vary widely based on the choices adoptive parents make. Foster adoption (if available) can be very affordable, depending on the local area you work with. Private domestic adoption is often quite expensive (though not always). International adoption can be very expensive or relatively affordable, depending on the country program and fee.

3. Adoption presents unique issues in parenting

No matter what kind of adoption you pursue, you’ll be having a series of very special conversations with that child about how they were born, and how their first parents weren’t able to care for a new child, but loved them so much that they made an adoption plan for them. This can be a beautiful conversation, but I’m sure it’s one that many adoptive parents approach with trepidation.

In addition, adoption often presents a unique set of things for new parents to worry about. Some wonder if they’ll be able to love and bond with an adopted child just like they would a biological one. (The good news is: the answer is yes!) In the case of international adoption, many wonder whether extended family members, friends or neighbors will embrace their transformation into a multi-cultural, multi-racial family.

Finally, some adopted children are deeply scarred as I wrote about previously – neglect, abuse, poverty and war are often the causes. The cumulative effects can result in physical disabilities, but more often than not, this kind of child has special emotional needs or developmental delays. Put simply, wounded children may require you to learn parenting skills you didn’t expect to need (the good news is, many of those resources are easily available).

4. Adoption is often opposed by powerful interests putting children’s needs last

This is a controversial subject that probably deserves its own post some day, but this is an important obstacle: from county governments in the United States to UNICEF’s work around the world, some very powerful interests are opposed to placing priority on a child’s need for permanence.

Look closely, and you’ll see the hidden priorities. Local foster care systems often work until the bitter end to reunite children with birth parents unable or unwilling to care for them. Whether this is driven by financial incentives (an adopted child no longer a ward of the state reduces funding for that agency) or anti-adoption attitudes, this approach does not consistently put the child’s best interests first.

On a global scale, UNICEF has become quite controversial for their dramatic and stubborn opposition to international adoption, literally preferring that children grow up in horribly understaffed orphanages in their “native culture” rather than be adopted by parents in another culture. Senator Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana) is a hero in the adoption movement and has led efforts to get them to change their attitude and policy approach.

What UNICEF perhaps doesn’t understand is that, in all modern cases that I’ve seen, the child’s culture becomes deeply interwoven into that family. My own family isn’t just an American family any longer – we’re proud to be a richly multi-cultural Korean-Ethiopian-American family. We feast on Korean bulkogi and Ethiopian doro wat and injera. We cheer for all three teams in the Olympics. We fly all three flags in our house. And while it’s up to our kids, we’d love for them (and for us) to learn the languages of their heritage in addition to the language of their home country.

How do we remove these obstacles?

Now that you see the four major obstacles to adoption, how do we knock them down? The final post on adoption will focus on four steps we need to take to remove the obstacles, and four ways that you can get involved in growing adoption as a partial solution to the global orphan crisis.

Next Post: Clearing the Path for Adoption to Grow

Photo Credit: Casey and Mary Beth Picker

Is Adoption the Answer?

This post is part of a series on the cause of orphan care, adoption and social change that I hope to make you as passionate about as I am. You may want to start from the beginning if you’re just joining us.

I didn’t write this entire “changing the world” series in advance. Partly because it has been quite a process to learn how to articulate this story: what Cacey and I saw in Africa, and what we’ve learned since. I’ve had friends and family say – “you described this as life changing…what did you mean?” and I struggled for the right words to convey it all. Hopefully this series has done a decent job doing so.

But the other reason is that I’m still in the process of learning a lot about the history of problems and solutions in the developing world – what has already been tried, what worked and what didn’t. Much of this story is still unfolding and isn’t even known yet. Perhaps that’s part of what has latched on to me with this issue…the whole problem is like a technology startup – chaotic, disorganized and full of opportunity.

So I’ll preface this post by saying that I’m not holding myself out as the world’s expert on the solutions to the global orphan crisis. I’ll do the best I can to share what I’ve seen and learned, and then I’ll share some exciting news about how I’m personally going to figure the rest of it out.

Is Adoption the Answer?

As John Seabrook writes in The New Yorker, “the practice of adoption goes back at least as far as Moses, [who] was adopted by the daughter of the Pharaoh of Egypt.” International adoption is a much more recent phenomenon, driven into the mainstream after the Korean War when bi-racial war orphans (Korean mother and GI father) were deserted on the streets and rejected by society.

A couple in Oregon named Harry and Bertha Holt saw that story in a newsreel, went to Congress and got the “Holt bill” passed and adopted eight two-year olds. Yes, eight of them. With friends of theirs opening their hearts to orphans overseas, they eventually formed Holt International. (Our immediate family has now been enriched three times by adoption, and all using Holt as our agency.)

The numbers tell a very clear story.

Adoption as a solution to the global orphan crisis is perhaps best described by Melissa Fay Greene in There Is No Me Without You as “a few families from foreign countries…throwing lifelines to individual children.” In 2005, Ethiopia had 4.4 million orphans, 1.5 million of those orphaned by AIDS, and 1,400 were adopted internationally.

Out of sheer practicality, it’s clear that intercountry adoption cannot be the sole solution to the global orphan crisis. That’s for a variety of reasons, but Greene (a five-time adoptive mother herself) probably put it best: “one continent cannot simply adopt another continent’s children.”

Adoption can also be very challenging. There are always risks involved with parenting. There are no guarantees in outcomes for biological or adopted children. Adopted kids tend to struggle with a healthy sense of identity and may need extra help discovering who they are. Many adopted children come from hard places and can be deeply scarred from wounds inflicted by neglect, abuse, poverty or war. Some have special needs, others have developmental delays.

Some of these are time intensive; the vast majority are quite minor. But adoptive parents have to approach this journey with their eyes open, and be brutally honest with themselves about what issues they can commit to handling. I’d venture to bet that the recent sad story of the mom “returning” her child to Russia was a case where this kind of self-honesty didn’t occur. When times are tough with our children, regardless of how they came into our family, we have to come back to the commitment we have made as parents.

Yet despite the numbers and the potential challenges, adoption is without question a critical part of the solution to the global orphan crisis.

Understand this: for children who are adopted (whether domestically or across international lines), this beautiful process for building a family is the only thing that stood between them and spending their entire childhood without the love and permanence of a family.

In other words, it’s the last hope they had to grow up with a mom and a dad.

Adoption – whether it’s international, private domestic or foster adoption – needs to grow dramatically. And that’s the first set of solutions that need to be developed: knocking down the obstacles to adoption.

That’s up next.

Next Post: The Obstacles to Adoption

Photo Credit: Blue Castle Photography

Innovation in the Developing World

I know, I know – I’m getting a lot of e-mails from you all who want to read the next installment of the “It’s Time to Change the World” series of blog posts. I want those posts to stand the test of time, so I am taking my sweet time making sure my thoughts are well-organized and cogent before I hit “publish.”

But in the mean time, here’s something interesting on the subject.

I had an exciting invitation about a week ago that I was thrilled to accept.

Back when Cacey and I were heading to Africa for the first time, my international roaming SIM card was having some problems. I tweeted about it, and out of the blue, a former marketing exec at that company tweeted back and connected me with another extraordinary person who fixed it.

Since then, I’ve become a big fan of that former marketing exec, Jackie Danicki. She now leads communications and external relations at Innovations for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, a project of Concern Worldwide US.

The “Innovations” project came about because of a $41 million dollar grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to create “bold and inventive ways to overcome barriers to delivering proven maternal, newborn, and child health solutions.”

As I’m sure you can see, maternal and child mortality have a tremendous impact on developing world poverty and the global orphan crisis. At best, a mother dying in childbirth leaves the remaining single-parent family teetering on the edge of poverty by removing 50% of the adults from the family. At worst, the remaining children instantly become orphans with no one to care for them.

Bringing real change to maternal, newborn and child health in the developing world will have a tremendous positive impact on lessening poverty and solving the global orphan crisis.

“Innovations” held an exciting competition for new ideas in the field. You can watch this video about what they did in Sierra Leone, Malawi, and India.

(Mobile, feed and e-mail readers: the video is embedded above.)

Now, a small panel facilitated by retired Intel CEO Craig Barrett, will be meeting next week in New York City to discuss and analyze the process.

I was more than a little bit surprised and humbled to be invited to join this group of people.

I’m hoping that my work in entrepreneurial business and product development, combined with my passion for Africa and the developing world, can contribute some useful ideas and out-of-the-box thinking to the process.

So on Saturday night, I’ll hop a red-eye to NYC (this is what happens when you buy plane tickets at the last minute). Along with some other meetings, the panel is on Tuesday and I fly home on Wednesday.

I’ll let you know what I see and learn there!

Changing the World Requires Sustainable Solutions

This post is part of a series on the cause of orphan care, adoption and social change that I hope to make you as passionate about as I am. You may want to start from the beginning if you’re just joining us.

We’ve talked about how different poverty is in the developing world when compared with the United States, but there are two more things that are critical to understand: first, the scope of poverty as expressed in US Dollars; and second, the foundation on which workable solutions will be built.

While I saw a lot of what I’ve been writing about while I traveled in Africa, I didn’t fully grasp the magnitude of it all until I came home and read The Hole in our Gospel, a gripping book by World Vision CEO Richard Stearns. (World Vision, by the way, is the largest non-profit focused on these issues in the entire world, with more international staff members than CARE, Save the Children and the US Agency for International Development combined.)

While it’s true that I didn’t agree with everything he wrote, Stearns’ point is addressed to the church and is deadly accurate – far too often, American Christians completely ignore the radical mandate for social change that we see in God’s words, perhaps best embodied in the command I often quote from Isaiah 1:17: “seek justice, encourage the oppressed, defend the cause of the fatherless.”

It was the statistics on poverty detailed in the book that grabbed me by the lapels and shook me.

Consider this: in the United States, the average income is $38,611 per person or $105 per day. And that’s just the average – we all know people with incomes that are a multiple of that amount.

Out of the 6.7 billion people we share this planet with:

• 60% or 4 billion live on less than $4 a day
• 38% or 2.6 billion live on less than $2 a day
• 15% or 1 billion live on less than $1

As Stearns puts it, “brace yourself for the good news” – you’re rich!

If you make more than $25,000 per year, you are in the top 10% of the population. If you make $50,000 per year, you’re now wealthier than 99% of the world’s inhabitants.

That fact has the potential to dramatically change how we see the world.

Now, here’s the key question: what do we DO with this information? How do we build solutions that are sustainable and can permanently end poverty, rather than stick a band-aid on it?

As I’ve read and listened to a number of authoritative voices on this subject, I’ve noticed a few of them expressing a sentiment best summarized like this: ‘free market capitalism may actually be the source of many of these problems, and at best, is a direct hindrance to solving them.’

I could not disagree more.

Nobody says it quite that explicitly, but I see that sentiment in the chapter of Stearns’ book when he rightly criticizes empty materialism, but argues that the American Dream and the fight against poverty are diametrically opposed, and throws out the line “we need to put the American Dream to death.”

I see it in the incredible must-read book There Is No Me Without You, Melissa Fay Greene’s 2006 chronicle of the AIDS pandemic sweeping Ethiopia. Not only do a few inaccurate partisan potshots slip through, but an entire chapter is devoted to using some awful excesses on the part of pharmaceutical companies to paint the principles of capitalism with an extraordinarily broad brush.

I don’t know either of these talented authors personally, but I think the world of them. It’s my guess that in their righteous zeal to eliminate hunger and disease, they have been blinded to an incredible fact.

Free market capitalism and the “American Dream” have been among the greatest killers of poverty the world has ever known.

Remember, the free market is not a zero sum game. There isn’t a fixed amount of money in the world. Eliminating poverty will not happen by forcibly taking from some and giving it to another. The right kind of economic growth and investment is a “rising tide that lifts all boats.”

Rather than attacking the wealthy (or the systems that allow people to become wealthy), aren’t we better off convincing people that “being our brother and sister’s keeper” is not only our responsibility as fellow human beings, but is in our best interests as well? After all, the world’s wealthy would be better off if the number of customers that can afford goods and services tripled from 2 billion to 6 billion.

Let me put this another way: the growing gap between rich and poor is not evidence that free market capitalism is evil; rather, it’s a clear indicator that the opportunity of free enterprise has yet to penetrate deeply enough.

Philip Smith and Eric Thurman understand that fact implicitly and make it over and over again in another incredible must-read book, A Billion Bootstraps: Microcredit, Barefoot Banking and the Business Solution for Ending Poverty (referred to me by my friend Shanley Knox). They document the success of using tiny microcredit loans to help people achieve permanent self-sufficiency, permanently lifting their families out of poverty. The examples they share and the framework they’ve built is inspiring and hopeful.

So let’s review.

• There are 145 million orphans worldwide, and one child joins their ranks every 18 seconds. These kids are missing the permanence and love that they were designed to have. There are three ways to reverse that trend: adoption, orphan care and orphan prevention.
• The best way to prevent kids from becoming orphans in the first place is to arrest the root cause that tears their families apart: the spiral of poverty in the developing world, driven by hunger, disease, lack of access to clean water and few opportunities in education or employment.
• You and I are clearly among the world’s 2 billion rich people (comparatively speaking), and if we work together to harness the free enterprise system that brought us prosperity, we have the resources and capability to help the other 4 billion become self-sufficient and pull themselves out of poverty.

Let’s talk solutions!

Next Post: Is Adoption the Answer?

Photo Credit: Aaron and Cacey Klein in Ethiopia

Why Developing World Poverty Exists…and Persists

This post is part of a series on the cause of orphan care, adoption and social change that I hope to make you as passionate about as I am. You may want to start from the beginning if you’re just joining us.

When was the last time you heard of anyone starving to death in the United States? Or dying of a mosquito bite for lack of drugs on the shelf of a California hospital? I’m not saying it never happens, but it almost never does.

In the United States, we mitigate the effects of poverty, and we’ve built the tools to allow most people to pull themselves out of poverty if they want to.

We mitigate the effects of poverty through a safety net of welfare, food stamps, emergency health care, a progressive income tax and public housing. We give people tools like all-but-free access to education, and access to the most coveted and vibrant free enterprise system in the world. Yes, we have challenges and problems, but we have it pretty good in the USA.

The third world has a very different kind of poverty.

Because the effects of poverty aren’t mitigated, and there are few tools to pull yourself out of it, even relatively prosperous middle class families can suddenly plummet into the depths of poverty when just one thing goes wrong: a family member falls ill, a cart overturns and destroys food that was to be sold, or weather destroys crops before they are harvested.

Think about living without reliable access to clean water, or working electricity. Without access to opportunities in education or employment. Without a governmental system that promotes justice and equality (ours isn’t perfect, but it’s among the best).

Let’s imagine, for a moment, a family living next door to Achiro, Yusuf and Kalu.

Their family cow died a few years ago, and there is no money to replace it. The family survives on the small amount of food they grow behind their shanty, or what little they can buy when they sell their surplus produce at market.

The mother spends most of her day with the baby strapped on her back, walking the two hours to a clean water spring with a group of women in her village, and then walking the two hours back while carrying the day’s water supply. The father walks several hours a day as well, so that he can earn about 20 birr – a little over $1.50 – helping a land-owning family to harvest their crops. Because of this, these dedicated parents manage to keep their three older children in school.

Then the mother falls sick. The needle that delivered a coveted vaccine five years ago seems to have delivered something else as well: a silent HIV infection. (Other common methods of infection may be infidelity on either spouse’s part, or being the victim of a horrific assault.)

Now, several years later, she has full-blown AIDS. Without access to antiretroviral drugs, her health will steadily deteriorate until she dies of a minor malady made great only because there is no immune system to stop it. Most likely, the years that she lived with this silent infection means that her husband is positive as well. The same fate will eventually befall him. And for all they know, the baby might be infected from breastfeeding.

When the mother dies, school becomes impossible for the children. At least one is needed to care for the baby and fetch the day’s supply of water. But HIV/AIDS is still misunderstood by many, so fear is likely to keep the others shunned from school as well.

At least the father and his four children still have a place to live – if he had died first, the entire family might have become instantly homeless, since ancient traditions in many African countries don’t give women the right to own or inherit property.

When these four lose their dad, there are only so many options available to them. They might just stay where they are, and the twelve year old becomes the new parent – “kids raising kids” as they call it. Or perhaps they end up in an orphanage if one exists nearby and has room.

Relatives might take them in, if they can be found. Yet many relatives will refuse – what if the baby is infected as well? And many are simply unable. How can they bring in four new mouths to feed when their own children already go hungry some nights?

The other options are unspeakable, especially for girls: slavery, prostitution, human trafficking.

I’m not being overly dramatic. This is not an atypical story in many parts of Africa right now. Take this scenario and multiply it by thousands of families, and you begin to see the problem.

• What happens when HIV/AIDS effectively wipes out an entire generation of moms, dads, doctors and teachers in a village or small town?
• What happens when sheer hunger prevents a father from being able to provide for his family?
• What happens when contaminated water or a mosquito bite brings a family to its knees, suffering from diseases conquered in the west years ago?
• And what happens when illiteracy and lack of any opportunity for education or employment makes it utterly impossible to change these realities?

This is the spiral that is poverty in the developing world.

Are you feeling “compassion fatigue” yet? Perhaps you’re thinking that you should pull back to the world you knew before? After all, what can one person do to change all of this?

I admit to having that thought cross my mind a couple of times.

But as William Wilberforce (the great British MP who led the abolition of slavery) once said, “having heard all of this, you may choose to look the other way, but you can never again say you did not know.”

So hang in there and don’t leave now. There’s one more post about the nature of poverty, but then we get to start talking about solutions. And I’m excited and passionate about the solutions that are developing to end poverty in our world.

“We can be the generation that no longer accepts that an accident of latitude determines whether a child lives or dies.” – Bono, U2 lead singer and founder of ONE campaign

Next Post: Changing the World Requires Sustainable Solutions

Photo: Aaron and Cacey Klein in Ethiopia

Achiro, Yusuf and Kalu

This post is part of a series on the cause of orphan care, adoption and social change that I hope to make you as passionate about as I am. You may want to start from the beginning if you’re just joining us.

We met our little girl for the first time on Christmas morning, and several days later, it was time to head into the southern part of Ethiopia to see where she was born, tour our agency’s operations there, and meet her birth mother. Except for Christmas morning, it was the highlight of our time in Africa.

Our motorcade consisted of three white vans, each seating about 10 people. Included in our traveling party were ten sets of adoptive parents. Three excited new siblings. A new grandmother. A passionate social worker. Several Holt Ethiopia staff members, including their development director Tesfaye. And our three drivers, native Ethiopians, led by a great fellow named Tsegaw.

Southern Ethiopia – at least the part we had the chance to see – isn’t the way you picture it from the movies. We saw nothing but beautiful rolling hills. Lots of little villages along the main highway. And more than a few small herds of cows or lines of donkeys, tempting fate by crossing the road while leaving small gaps for the vans to whisk through.

A caravan of “ferange” (foreigners) is a sight to behold, and the people we saw along the road all smiled and waved as we passed. When we would stop, the call would go out, children would come running and we’d be surrounded within moments – giving and receiving high fives, and taking photos of each child and showing them their picture on the digital camera screen. That always resulted in wild laughter.

At one stop in a small town called Butajirra, we parked and went inside a hotel to use the restrooms, and drink some Coca-Cola. A few of us wandered out on the balcony overlooking the main street, and quickly found ourselves waving at the kids passing by.

Two boys with a wheelbarrow carrying a third came to a stop, and all three came bounding up the stairs to the hotel balcony, the two oldest smiling and waving the entire time.

Achiro (middle) reached me first, and stuck out his hand. He spoke some English, which he proudly told me he was learning in school. He had no shoes, but no complaints, either. He introduced me to his brothers, Yusuf (left) and Kalu (right – clearly the skeptic of the three). The three boys were headed to the other end of the village with the wheelbarrow, to pick up some old vegetables for the family cow.

They lived in a small shanty on the north end of town. Judging from the looks of all the other shanties he pointed out to, theirs likely had a TV antenna sticking up out of the roof as their only link back to the rest of the world.

We conversed for a few minutes, and then he smiled and said he had to go – his mother and father were expecting him back to feed the cow. And with that, the three boys shook our hands and took off. We saw them again about ten minutes later, headed back with a wheelbarrow full of corn cobs and rotting greens.

Achiro, Yusuf and Kalu were some of the fortunate ones – they had parents who loved them, were raising them, were sacrificing to get them a basic education, and working to build a better life. As I watched them disappear down the muddy street, I couldn’t help but think of the other kids I was seeing on that street who weren’t as fortunate – most of them focused on begging for a few birr to buy some bread.

In other words, picture three young boys, who lived in a one-room dirt or concrete-floor shanty with a tin roof, and whose family income likely depended on a single cow that was fed rotten vegetables – you’ve just seen the typical middle class Ethiopian family.

One thing was patently obvious: it takes very little misfortune for a family to fall from the middle class to complete destitution. One illness, bad storm, death or tip of the wheelbarrow could be the difference. No savings account, no credit card, no emergency room, no safety net. These families live in the danger zone. Being middle class in the third world is a fragile thing.

The thing is, for every Achiro that exists in the developing world, there are about 9 kids living in deep and desperate poverty – ravaged by hunger, lacking clean water, wracked by diseases conquered elsewhere and exploited by corruption, violence or human trafficking. 145 million of those kids don’t have parents who are able to care for them. And every 18 seconds, another child joins their ranks.

It’s what led Africa to be called “a continent of orphans.”

I’m convinced that we will not change this reality unless we attack the problem at three separate points (I alluded to them in my first post).

Yes, we should adopt the precious kids whose birth parents are unable to care for them, and love them enough to make an adoption plan for them.

Yes, we must engage in caring for orphans worldwide, who are hanging in the balance between adoption or being reunited with their birth families.

But if we’re truly going to solve this problem, we’ve got to stop millions of these kids from becoming orphans in the first place.And you do that by helping families stay intact – either by giving them the tools to lift themselves out of poverty, or by helping them put some distance between themselves and the danger zone.

So let’s talk about poverty. I hope you’ll keep reading.

Next Post: Why Developing World Poverty Exists…and Persists

Photo Credit: Aaron and Cacey Klein in Ethiopia

It’s Time to Change the World

This post is the first in a series on the cause of orphan care, adoption and social change that I hope to make you as passionate about as I am. I hope you enjoy it!

If you’ve been a reader of this blog for any period of time, I’m sure you know that I’m proud to be an adoptive dad of two incredible kids: Spencer, who is 3 and was born in South Korea…and Emma, who is 1 and was born in Ethiopia.

Cacey and I didn’t adopt these two because we wanted to do something special for them. The reality is, they did something very special for us – they made us parents. We are convinced that before the beginning of time, there was a plan to make what we laughingly call our “typical Korean-Ethiopian-American family” out of Aaron, Cacey, Spencer Daniel Sang-Jin and Emma Nichole Asnakech Klein.

The foundational principle of adoption is the belief that every child deserves permanence. Children weren’t designed to grow up in institutions or even temporary homes. They were designed to grow up in permanent, loving families.

Yet the world’s “systems” aren’t aligned with this reality yet.

Here in the United States, we have a foster care system without a strong emphasis on permanence. The result: 1 out of every 2 children who age out of the system without a permanent family will end up in prison, unemployed, on welfare or dead. It’s the most at-risk subgroup of our population by far.

In the third world, we see countries frantically trying to facilitate the building and staffing of new orphanages, in a desperate effort to shield children from poverty, exploitation, human trafficking, prostitution, hunger and disease. Yet there are 145 million children without parents to care for them – and that number grows by one child every 18 seconds.

The cause of orphan care and adoption is about reversing those trends in three ways:

• Using adoption to bring children into permanence and love
• Caring for orphans waiting to be adopted or reunited with a birth family
• Preventing children from becoming orphans in the first place

Cacey and I have been on a journey of reading, living, praying, sleeping and breathing these things since our feet first touched African soil last December.

It’s not that visiting the beautiful country of Spencer’s birth wasn’t equally special – it was.

But touching the face of poverty…seeing the budding potential that is Africa and the “third world”…and discovering from personal experience how interconnected the 6 billion people on this planet truly are…well, let’s just say it was life-changing.

This is the first in a series of posts on this topic. I want to share a little bit about this journey with you, and the conclusions it has led me to.

And I hope that when I’m done, you’ll be interested in doing some fairly radical things.

Will you join me? Maybe we can be part of changing the world together. I hope you’ll keep reading.

Next Post: Achiro, Yusuf and Kalu

Photo Credit: Aaron and Cacey Klein in Ethiopia (top), Blue Castle Photography (bottom)