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

staff discuss how they fall in love with each group of children. They want new volunteers to come and fall in love too.
    It seemed to be working already. “The kids are very accepting,” Reagan said with a soft smile. “They cling to you. From the moment we came in the youngest came up and put his arms around me. I thought it was going to be harder with the language barrier, but you figure it out.”
    But the fact of the children’s easy affection gets back at BridgeStone’s thin ethical line. As Larissa showed me the rest of the grounds, her phone rang. It was Tom—his ringtone on Larissa’s phone sounds like the main riff of Muddy Waters’s “Mannish Boy”—calling to meet up and take over my tour. He met us by the camp’s manmade pond in an SUV with a cracked windshield—Benz at least was not getting rich off this program—beaming widely with a Bluetooth in his ear. He seemed guileless: quick to laugh at himself but smarter than the first impression he gives—of someone so open as to be naive, believing in his plan so completely that he can’t imagine anyone seeing it differently. Within minutes of our meeting, Benz launched into the duality at the heart of his ministry: loudly touting its adoption promotion to US supporters but masquerading as a cultural exchange program when speaking to US or Ukrainian governments.
    “Our program in Ukraine,” he said, navigating deep rainwater trenches in the dirt roads, “if it were about adoption, it couldn’t happen. . . . Everyone knows it’s about adoption, but it can’t be about adoption.” He looked at me to see if I followed. Just as he had tried to do in Haiti, Benz has positioned Bridges of Faith as an educational opportunity for children to learn English and experience another country. Every time he brings a new group of children over, he said, the US embassy in Ukraine sends him an e-mail and hard-copy letter telling him that “You know this can’t be about adoption.”
    The reason it can’t be about adoption is because Ukraine has cause to enact limitations on its hosting exchanges. Although Ukraine has long sent children for international adoption in the United States, in recent years it has tried to replace this with domestic adoption by Ukrainianparents instead, as the nation’s economy has grown and the country faces its own increasing infertility issues. In past years the pressure to find children for lucrative foreign adoptions has led to scandals, including a baby-selling scheme in which Ukrainian mothers’ children were stolen after birth and offered for adoption as orphans. These days there are no healthy children under three years old available for international adoption from Ukraine, and very few under six.
    But even the adoption of older children has run into problems. Although Benz doesn’t officially call Bridges of Faith a hosting exchange, it is very similar to the hosting programs that have become ubiquitous in US Christian communities. In these programs, often organized through churches, families host Eastern European orphanage children for a few weeks or months, ostensibly as a foreign exchange program but in practice frequently as an informal adoption audition to see if they bond with the child. This host-to-adopt scenario is widespread despite the fact that the Ukrainian government retains all control over assigning children for adoption and forbids nongovernmental parties from circulating information or pictures about children available for adoption. Although the Ukrainian government has banned “preselection” of its children for adoption—in which foreign adopters request a specific child, likely one they had hosted, since no one outside the government is supposed to know children’s adoption status—in reality government officials often look the other way when it comes to requests for older children, who are less in demand by Ukrainian parents.
    But even though they’re common, these programs can be harmful for both