Christine Howe

Reflection

Before: ​What was the single story you held initially and why do you think you possessed that
particular single story?
The single story that I had before I did this research is that when someone adopts from
anywhere in Africa, they are essentially rescuing the child from a life of poverty and loneliness.
Even saying this makes me uncomfortable because even when I held that single story before
researching I felt almost guilty about it. I think I possessed this idea because of the way the
media has portrayed adopting from Africa as this wonderful thing that saves a child, and also
because of a specific podcast I listened to a few years ago. I don’t remember the name of it, but it
was about a boy who was adopted and has severe attachment problems and anger issues because
of the trauma in his early life, pre-adoption. I don’t even know if the boy was from Africa, but I
associated him with it and it reiterated this single story. I think the biggest thing that provided me
this story is that it was not questioned in society and the media I was consuming. Maybe this was
because I was not looking for it, but it was never contradicted or talked about in anything other
than a positive light in the things I was seeing on a daily basis.

After: ​How did your research help you complexify the single story narrative you originally
possessed? How did you develop a more complete story, in other words?
In order to complexify and dispel the single story I had about adoption in and out of
Africa, I decided to specifically research the process and ethics of adoption in Ethiopia. This was
really interesting, especially because Ethiopia recently stopped allowing international adoptions.
One of the things that stuck with me the most was that a large percentage of the children who are
in orphanages in the country are not there because they have no remaining family members, but
because their family is too impoverished to properly take care of them. This complexified my
single story because although it did not necessarily change it, it added to the idea that adopting a
kid from Ethiopia or another country in Africa will almost certainly save a child from a “bad”
life. After researching further, a challenge to this idea appeared. The leader of an orphanage in
Liberia told the media that sometimes they keep children in the orphanages because they want
them to be able to grow up in their culture and knowing where they came from. Though this did
not come from an Ethiopian perspective, it is still relevant. It made me wonder if being adopted
into a foreign family that may or may not have the means to take better care of a child than it’s
birth family is a fair trade off to knowing your culture and growing up in the thick of it. I
definitely don’t have the answer to this question, but it is worth thinking about. Another narrative
that was interesting was that of a young woman who was adopted into Norway from Ethiopia,
who expressed sadness that she was a minority in her community and a disconnect from her
“birth culture”. In conclusion, while most of the research I did claimed that adopting a child out
of an impoverished Ethiopia would give he/she a “better” life, this single story was complexified
by the idea that taking a child out of his/her culture may have harmful effects.