Free The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption by Kathryn Joyce

them about God’s plan for their lives; another group was invited into the bullpen of the Atlanta Braves; others rode in top model cars, racing at 120 mph; and in August a drop-in visit from the state police helicopter surprised one child with a birthday, Sasha, as he was playing in a field, lowering two troopers by rope to deliver the boy a birthday cake. In his newsletter updates Benz seemed overcome with wonderment. “We have no idea what eternal and indelible impact this gift had on young Sasha, a young man who daily feels the rejection and humiliation known only to orphans.”
    In the camp’s main hall, in a dining area lined with three rows of sixty-foot foldout tables, covered in plastic tablecloths and Christmas knickknacks, I met Larissa Benz, a petite, attractive forty-seven-year-old in jeans and a burgundy leather jacket, her dark hair pulled into a neat ponytail. She introduced me to the staffers playing with the children—ten mostly preteen kids on loan from an orphanage in the Zaporizhya region of Ukraine who were learning to play kickball on the lawn outside the main hall. Watching from the benches were three Ukrainian women: Katya Chislova, BridgeStone’s interpreter and orphan ministry leader; Julia, the orphanage representative sent to monitor the program; and Natasha, an independent adoption coordinator, there to talk to US parents who decide to adopt one of the children. Each group of ten children that Bridges of Faith brings over for a month-long stay costs more than $65,000 in fees, airfare, and expenses, including the round-trip travel fees for the Ukrainian adults accompanying them. As an independent agent among Ukraine’s numerous adoption facilitators, Natasha, a platinum blonde in her twenties, came to Alabama unpaid (besides her airfare) but with the assumption that the trip will generate upon her return a number of adoptions and, thus, corresponding facilitators’ fees—from $4,000 to $12,000 per child. The business implications were clear. A previous facilitator had been unable to come on this trip, Natasha told me, because he was too busy in Ukraine finalizing the adoptions that had resulted from a prior group. By September 2011, 85 percent of the first two groups of children BridgeStone had hosted were in the process of being adopted.
    Climbing into a small white golf cart, Larissa gave me a tour of the property. It was a testament to the work that had been going on over the past two years, with its two sets of clustered cabins, numerous staff buildings and trailer homes, a rec room, chapel, and pool as well as a paintball field, horse barn, and manmade pond, all connected with two miles of rutted dirt roads. We arrived at CenterPoint, a unique construction of two modular trailer buildings the Air Force donated and connected by a central living area that one of BridgeStone’s supporters designed. CenterPoint is where the Ukrainian kids stay with their translator and a rotating group of American houseparents. When I visited, the houseparents were a willowy young woman in her twenties named Reagan and her husband Tee, a taciturn man in a baseball cap, who together had a two-year-old boy. They had come as a part of their church mission team after hearing about Benz’s program through their homeschooling group. Perhaps unbeknownst to them, they had also been plucked as potential adoptiveparents. Benz and the rest of the BridgeStone staff choose as houseparents young couples who already have children, in part so they will have parenting experience but also because they’re people whom the BridgeStone group thinks would make good adoptive parents.
    “We have a lot of people who come [thinking], ‘Gosh, the mission field’s come to Alabama!’” Benz explains. “‘We can drive thirty minutes and reach out to kids’. . . . And then they come and fall in love with the kids and say, ‘I’m going to take one home.’” “Fall in love” is a phrase in heavy rotation at BridgeStone, as