First Meeting With the Adoption Lawyer

I saw the American adoption lawyer today. I immediately liked her. She is friendly and but straightforward.

We discussed the stages of the process and the length of time I could expect each stage to take. Basically the paperwork would take a year. And then we would be able to be foster parents to a girl for 6 months before the adoption would be finalised.

She told me that we are her first South African clients. She didn’t know of any other South African who have adopted here apart from one South African woman who did a private adoption. I suspect I know who she is referring to, as I also know of only one other South African woman who adopted here.

I am not really surprised. The expat-community can roughly be divided into three groups, those who work for private companies (and whose main reason for being here is the salary), those who work for the diplomatic service, and those who work for aid agencies/NGO’s/organisations like the UNDP, etc. The most South Africans who are based here are working for large companies, and not NGO’s or aid organisations. So, it is in general not a group of people with strong altruistic inclinations. Not that I think that is the motivation for adopting a child, but it does play a role.

Secondly there is the South African history. We had apartheid. Some white families would take a child into their home during those years, but they would never become part of the family. The adoption lawyer told me that she adopted a child from South Africa 9 years ago, and a black woman approached her in a restaurant and wanted to know who the child is and what she was going to do with it. After explaining that she had adopted the baby the woman asked: “But where will it sleep?” She apparently was very surprised to hear that the baby will sleep with the family in the house.

Things have changed. But when I really thought about it I realised that even the adoption of white children in South Africa has never been looked at very favourably. If you could not have your own children, yes, of course, then a couple would be applauded for doing such a self-sacrificing thing as giving an orphan a home. But even then it would usually be a closed adoption, spoken about in hushed terms. Adopted children were sometimes only told about their adoption when they were adults, or never at all. Orphans and adopted children simply had a lower status in the eyes of the community.