Today there was yet another article on transracial adoption in the media. This one was in the Chicago Tribune. I've cut and paste the entire text of the article because the website makes you register to read it, which is a pain in the you know what. :)

I know one of the families personally in this article and even delivered their gift package and photo album to little Safia when we were in Addis in February.

I think this article is better done than most. I love that they point out that Ethiopian adoptions were happening and becoming more popular BEFORE Angelina. Enjoy the read.

Out of Ethiopia
As more white Americans embrace African adoptions, experts applaud good intentions but point out social realities

By Nara Schoenberg
Tribune staff reporter
Published August 18, 2006

The youngest of seven children, 1-year-old Safia Lindholm-Nimrod knows how to steal the spotlight.

First, she monopolizes her mother with grins and giggles. Then, she focuses her chubby-cheeked smile on her father, demanding -- and receiving -- the biggest and longest hug when he comes through the door at the end of the day.

Finally, she lands in the arms of her sister Ella Lindholm-Uzzi, 11, who twirls her until she squeals with joy.

None of this would be terribly remarkable, except that Safia has only known these people for two months.

Born in a thatch-roofed hut in Ethiopia, placed in an orphanage by a single mother who couldn't afford to keep her, and adopted by an Evanston couple before her first birthday, Safia (pronounced SUH-fee-uh) is part of the first major wave of African adoptions ever in the U.S.

Ethiopia became the first African nation to hit the U.S. State Department's list of the top 10 foreign countries from which Americans adopt in 2004 -- the year before Angelina Jolie brought home her Ethiopian-born daughter, Zahara.

This year, the numbers are on pace to increase again, by about 20 percent, to 530 adoptions, according to State Department data.

And while Ethiopia still trails nations such as China, the undisputed leader with 8,000 children arriving here in 2005, Russia with 5,000, and Guatemala with 4,000, observers say that the increase is significant.

"People are finally thinking of adopting from Africa," says Meghan Hendy, executive director of the Joint Council on International Children's Services.

Among the reasons: In a continent where adoption by strangers isn't widely accepted, Ethiopia is the first nation to open its doors to large-scale adoption of healthy babies and toddlers by Americans.

Celebrities such as Jolie, movies such as "The Constant Gardener," and a flood of news reports have helped by drawing attention to war, poverty and AIDS in Africa.



Racism a challenge

And, in a nation where adoptive parents are generally white, changing attitudes toward race -- with polls showing, for instance, more support of interracial marriage -- may be a factor as well.

"More and more [white] people are willing to adopt the black [American] child or the part African-American child, and it didn't used to be that way," says Dick Van Deelen, the founding director of Adoption Associates Inc., in Jenison, Mich.

"There was a time, a few years ago, when [these children] were very hard to place."

Given the scale of the AIDS orphan crisis in sub-Saharan Africa, where an estimated 11 million children have lost their parents, experts say Ethiopian adoption is a potential lifesaver for some of the world's most vulnerable children.

But some also caution that interracial adoption brings challenges for white parents such as helping a child deal with racism that they themselves have not experienced, and should never be undertaken lightly.

"Our country's history of racism has, very much, a black and white focus, and I think there are potentially greater challenges for adoption of children who are African into white families than perhaps children who are Asian," says consultant Peter Gibbs, the founding director of the Center for Adoption Research at the University of Massachusetts in Worcester.In a half-dozen interviews, adoptive parents in Illinois, Florida and California told of widely varied journeys to Ethiopia, with starting points ranging from a neighbor who adopted there, to a harrowing scene in a movie, to a life-changing magazine article.

Safia's future adoptive parents already had their hands full with five children from their previous marriages and one from their own when her mother, Marika Lindholm, told her father, Ray Nimrod, that she had always wanted to adopt. "You're kidding," Nimrod said. "That's something that's been on my mind."

Lindholm, 43, a writer, and Nimrod, 46, a patent attorney, were considering several countries when they went to see the movie "Hotel Rwanda," about genocide in Africa.

"There's a scene [after a massacre], where they have children -- just hundreds of them -- tied up with pieces of string to each other and labeled with numbers, because some of them will have parents to find them and some of them won't," Lindholm says, choking up.

"Just remembering it, I'm freakin' out. I'm gonna cry."

Walking out of that movie, she says, she knew she was going to adopt from Africa.



`We could do this'

Mary Knobler, 43, a bond trader in Santa Monica, Calif., with two biological children, wasn't even thinking of having a third child when her husband gave her a wrenching article on Ethiopian adoption, complete with descriptions of children dying of AIDS and orphans desperate for American parents.

"We could do this," said the Knoblers, who, together with their biological children, cast a unanimous vote to adopt Nati, now 7, after seeing him on an adoption agency video.

Most of the parents adopting had concerns about interracial adoption -- basically, whether it would be hard on their children. And the topic of how white parents can support their black children has sparked intense discussion at the Children's Home Society & Family Services' Internet forum on Ethiopia.

"I think you have to be very aware and prepare . . . for discrimination, feelings of identity confusion, all of the hard stuff that's going to come," says Lindholm, who initially stayed up at night worrying about whether adoption by a white family would be fair to a black child.

Among the factors that she considered were the diversity of her community and her social network -- Safia's godparents are both African-American, as is her pediatrician. "But the main thing I felt I could do for [Safia] is adopt a sibling," Lindholm says.

Three of the couples interviewed for this story, including the Lindholm-Nimrods, intend to adopt from Ethiopia again, in part so that their children won't be the only black kids in the family.

Several parents say adopting from Ethiopia will affect future moves -- they don't want to live in all-white communities where their black children might feel conspicuous or isolated.

And one mother in an Internet forum said that her family actually moved to a big, liberal city -- Minneapolis -- in order to give her Ethiopian-born child a more diverse and supportive environment.

A 1993 review of studies on interracial adoption that appeared in the journal The Future of Children, a publication of Princeton University and the Brookings Institution, found "research . . . indicates that most minority children in transracial placement adjust very well to their mixed-race environments."

So far, most of the parents interviewed report they have encountered little or no racism from strangers.

"We definitely get looks, but it's always looks of warmth," says Lisa Crowe, 42, of Rogers Park, who says the response is the same in her diverse city neighborhood and when she goes back home to small-town Indiana.

"What a beautiful family you have," people say to Crowe, a physical therapist, and her husband, a social worker, when they're out with their three daughters, the youngest of whom, 2-year-old Faith Crowe-Barnes, was adopted from Ethiopia. Or, "What a nice family." Or, just "Thank you" for adopting from Africa.



Healthy children

Some parents say they were drawn to the good physical and emotional health of many of the children coming out of Ethiopia, and the fine reputation of the country's orphanages.

And several parents report that they may have been influenced by more subtle factors, including their own families' experiences with race or discrimination.

Safia's father, Ray Nimrod, looks Northern European, but his heritage includes a dark-skinned Assyrian grandfather who married an Irish-American. When Nimrod's father would help out with the family paint contracting business, visiting work sites, workers would sometimes say, "Oh, we're so glad it's you, instead of that black guy."

"Well," Nimrod's father would respond, "that man is my father."

Much is unknown about the future of Ethiopian adoption in America, including how much it can grow. But parents and adoption officials say that at least some increase is likely, as the option becomes more widely known, and that, at this point, the children appear to be adjusting well.

Safia, the biological daughter of a single mother who risked being expelled from her rural village for keeping her baby, bonded with her adoptive father almost immediately, refusing to be held by anyone else, including friendly Ethiopians, on the long plane trip home.

When she saw her mother for the first time at Midway Airport, she practically flew into her arms.

"These kids have real spunk and fight in them," Lindholm says.

"[Safia's] a fighter. She's got a great spirit, and she's a happy, happy, happy kid."