Has anyone worked with Wide Horizons or Love the Children in MA?

Question

any feedback would be good. We are likely going to adopt from Korea.

Answer 1

Wide Horizons is who Angelina adopted through and she was also put onto the board there.

2007-11-24

Why did an adoption agency tell Angelina Jolie I had died of AIDS when they gave her my baby?

By STEPHEN BEVAN - More by this author » Last updated at 21:08pm on 24th November 2007

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She's happy her daughter Zahara has a better life in America with Angelina Jolie, but in her first-ever interview the child's mother raises disturbing questions about how she was adopted...

Her credentials as a caring superstar could hardly be bettered. Angelina Jolie, mother of four, is as famous for her well-publicised adoptions of children from Third World countries as she is for her Oscar-winning movies and marriage to Brad Pitt.

As a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Commissioner for Refugees for the past six years, the beautiful 32-year-old actress has travelled frequently to impoverished African states, often to the heart of a conflict, to highlight the plight of the world's most desperate people.

Only last month she visited Western Sudan to bring to the world's attention the appalling conditions endured by an estimated 2.5 million people who have fled brutal ethnic fighting in the war-torn province of West Darfur.

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Angelina Jolie and Zahara

Angelina Jolie has chosen not to visit the lakeside town in Addis Ababa where Zahara was born

The visit took the film star within an hour's flight of neighbouring Ethiopia – the birthplace of her daughter Zahara, whom she adopted amid much publicity in July 2005 in what seemed to be a flamboyant act of charity.

Indeed, even the most cynical Hollywood-watcher couldn't fail to be moved by Angelina's description of the h**l from which her new daughter had been removed. The little girl's natural mother had, according to Angelina, died of AIDS.

Malnourished and suffering from rickets, six-month-old Zahara was, it was claimed, just days away from death when Angelina found her at an orphanage in Addis Ababa, nursed her back to health and adopted her.

Although they knew Zahara had family back in Ethiopia, Angelina and Brad have chosen not to visit Awassa, the lakeside town where the little girl was born. Had they done so, they may well have been shocked by what they found.

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Zahara with adopted mum and dad Brad and Angelina - and her siblings Maddox, Pax, and the couple's biological daughter Shiloh

The Mail on Sunday has discovered that not only is Zahara's mother, Mentewab Dawit Lebiso, alive and well, but that the man who arranged Zahara's adoption has been waging a campaign of threats and intimidation against her family.

When rumours surfaced last week in America that all was not as it appeared with the paperwork, the American headquarters of the international adoption agency Wide Horizons For Children initially insisted that Zahara's mother was dead. And yet in Ethiopia, the man who brought Zahara to the agency knows Mentewab is alive and has been attempting to shut her up.

Last week, The Mail on Sunday travelled to Zahara's home town and talked, through interpreters, not only to the extended family but to Mentewab herself.

Although aged 24, she is struggling, between selling onions in a market, to finish high school. It is a measure of the desperate lack of opportunity afforded to young Ethiopians: in this part of the world, many people don't start any sort of formal learning until they are in their mid-teens.

In taped interviews, Mentewab, her mother Almaz Elfneh, 45, and sisters Frehiwot, 18, and Zinash, 20, told a disturbing story of rape, grinding poverty, lies and dubious official paperwork.

Zahara's natural mother Mentewab Dawit Lebiso

It was this, rather than AIDS, which took Zahara on the extraordinary journey from her starving family to an orphanage in Addis Ababa and on to the Hollywood mansion owned by two of the world's most famous film stars.

And while the American headquarters of Wide Horizons For Children and Angelina may well be oblivious to the harsh realities of what goes on in adoptions such as these, the revelations have come as no surprise to the man who arranged the adoption for the agency, 'Mr Fix-It' Girma Degu.

Indeed, rather than try to deny it when confronted with the family's account of what happened, he went straight to the house where Mentewab was staying with her sisters in Awassa. There, he threatened to have one of her sisters jailed for talking to journalists.

We talked to Mentewab in the dirt yard outside her uncle's home. Her story starts in 2004, many miles away from Awassa in the town of Shone where Mentewab was staying with her grandmother while she attended school.

One night, when her grandmother was away on business, a stranger broke in and subjected her to a brutal rape. When, a few months later, it became impossible to hide the fact that Mentewab was pregnant, her relatives disowned her.

"I felt so lonely," said Mentewab in her native Amharic language.

"I thought about having an abortion but I didn't have the money. There was nothing I could do."

In the absence of other options, Mentewab, who was determined to finish her education, went to stay with a cousin in nearby Hosanna. Her baby girl was born at Hosanna hospital on January 7, 2005 – Christmas Dayin Ethiopia.

Mentewab called her Yemasrech, which means 'good news', although she was later renamed Tena Adam, the name of a local herb.

Mentewab struggled to look after her daughter with virtually no money. When her mother Almaz learned of her plight, she came to Hosanna.

Mentewab said: "She told me, 'It's all right, we can raise this baby together.' I think she thought I might kill myself if she didn't help me."

All three returned to Awassa, where they stayed with Mentewab's uncle in a gloomy, cramped, three-room hut with a mud floor and tin roof on the outskirts of town. Almaz looked after the baby while Mentewab worked as a labourer on a building site.

Her meagre wages paid barely enough to feed them.

"Sometimes allI had was a piece of bread all day," Mentewab said. Finally, when her uncle asked them to leave his house and find their own place to rent, their family life went into freefall.

"My baby was crying all the time because she was hungry.

"I thought she was going to die because there was no food, so I ran away," Mentewab said.

It was the act of a frightened and ill-educated girl but her decision to flee was to have far-reaching consequences.

Almaz said: "After Mentewab left I didn't have money to buy her food so the baby lost a lot of weight. She was really skinny. I was even thinking she could die. I went to the Kebele (the local council) and told them my daughter ran away and had left the baby with me.

"I said to them, 'Please take the baby before she dies.' They asked me to bring three people to witness that the mother had run away and that I could not afford to keep the baby."

Almaz had already been introduced to Girma, a local man, by her sister- in-law and he agreed to take the baby after the Kebele gave its consent.

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Mentewab

Mentewab wants her daughter to 'know her country and she must know her family because that is where her identity is'

"Girma took the baby to Addis Ababa," Almaz said.

"He promised he would keep in touch. He said he would bring back the baby to visit after five months and he would send me a picture.

"He also promised to introduce me to the family that would adopt her."

Almaz said she never told Girma or the authorities that her daughter had died.

"But then Girma came to me and told me that the baby had been adopted and taken abroad. He said there will be journalists coming to you and you must deny the whole story and say it is not your granddaughter."

After stories first began to circulate two years ago that Zahara's birth mother was still alive, Almaz says a furious Girma dragged her to the local council offices and accused her of lying. He also tried to force her to say that Zahara was not her granddaughter.

"He brought this woman who claimed Tena Adam was her daughter. He tried everything to get me to say that it's not my granddaughter. He even threatened that he'd put me in jail and have me tortured."

But Almaz refused to budge.

The revelation that Zahara's mother is alive and living on £1 a week while she struggles to complete her education will come as a huge embarrassment to Wide Horizons For Children, which claims to have placed more than 10,000 children from all over the world with Western families since 1974.

Dr Tsegaye Berhe, head of the agency in Ethiopia, said he had been told Zahara's mother was dead at the time of the adoption and had the official papers to prove it.

"We have to trust the documents we received. She (Almaz) has signed, three witnesses have signed, but the document is saying something different to what she is saying now. She said her daughter had died."

And in a move some might regard as intimidation, Dr Berhe added that he had asked the government to instruct Ethiopian police to investigate whether the grandmother had lied to the Kebele.

"We have already talked to the government. The grandmother has given two statements. One that the mother is dead, another that she is alive. So we have already told the government what she is doing and that it has to take action now because it is the government she's made to look foolish.

"It's a big scandal to say something then another thing the next day. That will make a big problem for her."

Dr Berhe produced the paperwork he

Answer 2

We used Wide Horizons to adopt our son from Ethiopia and could not have been more pleased. The whole organization is very transparent. We knew every step that was going on the entire time. We were able to meet our son's family and WHFC has facilitated our maintaining contact with them, helping us to get info back and forth (which would be very hard for us to do on our own given that there are no roads or regular deliveries where his family is located).

As for as the Angelina Jolie situation, the birth mom and grandmother have been on the tv with Dr. Tsegaye from WHFC giving their blessing to the adoption and denying any scandal or wrongdoing by them or anyone associated with them. In fact they say the paparazzi and press purposefully mistranslated their words and bribed those around them to change their story. The grandmother stated on tv and for the written press (I'm trying to find the youtube, but all the searches say video no longer available), that she did believe her daughter was dead when she didn't return home, and that is what she told the agency. Both said they were never threatened or coerced. In addition the law in Ethiopia makes in necessary for for the parents or person caring for the child to go to court in Addis Ababa and state why they can no longer care for them. So if death was on the certificate it would have been because of a statement made in court by the grandmother, and if she didn't already know (which is unlikely) the grandmother would have been informed at that time that the child would be sent to the US. So there are many parts of that article posted above that simply could not have happened the way described.

Here is another article which quotes the mother:

Zahara Jolie-Pitt’s biological mum reveals rape; denies dispute

The biological mother of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s older daughter Zahara has revealed that the little girl was conceived after a rape.

Zahara was originally thought to be an orphan when Angelina adopted her from Ethopia in 2005 but her biological mother Mentwabe Dawit has now come forward to deny rumours she’s planning to challenge Angelina and Brad for custody.

Mentwabe explained that Zahara, who she had previously named Yemsrach, was born after a rape in 2004. Mentwabe told Reuters that she was walking home one evening after a day working at a construction site when a man approached her in the dark: “He pulled a dagger, put one hand on my mouth, so that I could not scream. He then raped me and disappeared.”

She kept her pregnancy a secret for as long as possible because she “feared the consequences of being raped in a community where rape is considered a taboo” but when she finally told her mother about her condition, “it was not as I feared. I found my mother understanding and consoling. She urged me not to do anything rash, which might endanger my life.”

She gave birth in the family’s home but was unable to feed the baby: “My baby was on the verge of death. She became malnourished and was even unable to cry. I was desperate and decided to run away, rather than see my child dying.”

Mentwabe’s family were unable to find her and assumed that she had died, so put the baby up for adoption. Mentwabe added: “My mother was not misled by anyone, as was alleged by some media outlets. Her motive was to save the child from dying which I fully understand.”

“I have never disputed the adoption of my baby by Angelina Jolie. I think my daughter is a very fortunate human being to be adopted by a world famous lady. I wish them both all the success they deserve.”

Answer 3

I think more Koreans such as yourself should adopt more children from Korea that are "orphans".  Good luck.