Art Stannard’s feet fidget as he kneels on the floor of Terminal 2 at Sky Harbor International Airport. He stares down a carpeted ramp in front of him that leads to the gate that in a few minutes will introduce children he has never met – his two new adopted children – to America.
Standing next to him, his daughter Kayla, 5, waits patiently for her mom to come walking down that ramp. His 3-year-old son, Christian, busies himself by spinning in endless circles, laughing at his self- inflicted dizziness.
“There’s Mommy,” Christian says, as he runs toward a red security ribbon designed to allow only passengers through. advertisement
Little feet, the ones they have been waiting months to see, come running down the ramp. Art waves to his wife, who is carrying a clingy baby girl.
When Jill Stannard, 26, bends down to hug her kids and her kneeling husband, it’s the first time the members of her newly expanded family have met one another.
“We’re in America,” Jill says to Yednek, 3, who keeps his feet close to his new mom as he looks around with wide eyes.
Adoption hot spot
Yednek and Elshidie, the baby girl clinging to Jill’s arm, are two of a growing number of children who have been adopted from Ethiopia over the past few years. Sure, pop-culture icons Angelina Jolie and Madonna have added to their brood by way of African adoptions, but the uptick in the trend started before little Zahara and David found homes with two of America’s biggest stars.
Of the more than 20,000 international adoptions in the U.S. last year, 732 of them were from Ethiopia, a 66 percent increase from 2005. The State Department monitors the number of immigrant visas issued to orphans to track the number of international adoptions.
International adoptions from Ethiopia have increased for a number of reasons, according to Tami Stewart, adoption program director for Dove Adoptions International.
Sometimes, it’s faster and less expensive compared with other international adoptions or domestic adoptions.
“Ethiopia has a typically lower timeline,” Stewart says. “I’m not saying it’s fast. It’s not a drive-through.”
For others like the Stannards, Stewart says, Africa is just in their hearts.
“A lot of it is the age of families that are looking at adopting right now,” Stewart says. “These are the families that grew up with We Are the World, things like that. There is a sort of history with Ethiopia and the famine and starving.”
Stewart says the Hollywood adoptions have raised awareness about the plight of African orphans, but adoptive families usually take offense to anyone who may suggest they are looking to Africa because it’s trendy.
Madonna and Angelina aside, the increase in African adoptions is reshaping the look of the average American adoptive family.
“A majority of families are White, and a surprising number already have children,” Stewart says.
Just like the Stannards, who live in the Santan area of Pinal County southeast of Queen Creek. After trying unsuccessfully for a few months to conceive a third child, they looked to adoption. With an aunt living in Kenya, Jill Stannard says Africa was already in her heart.
Adoptions from Russia, Ukraine and Guatemala have made it tough to know if a child is adopted. And with China as the No. 1 destination for American adoptive families since at least 2000, White families with Asian children are becoming much more commonplace.
With the rise in Ethiopian adoptions, seeing White families with African kids will become more common. Mary Ostyn, an adoptive mother who blogs about Ethiopian adoptions, says she thinks tighter restrictions on Chinese adoptions, such as age, weight and income requirements for adoptive parents, also have contributed to an increase in Ethiopian adoptions. But she also thinks the trend speaks to a changing mind-set in America.
“I would like to think that families also are getting more comfortable with becoming more multi-ethnic,” Ostyn, of Idaho, says in an e-mail to The Republic. “It’s an exciting change and one that more and more families across America are experiencing.”
Race concerns
Matthew Whitaker, an associate professor of history at Arizona State University, says the trend is curious. He says it’s wonderful when children who need homes find them, even if it means they may face certain societal challenges as a member of a mixed-race family.
But he says he worries about how those children are shaped and how that family goes about exposing the children to their heritage.
“It’s critical these people teach the kids about their African heritage,” Whitaker says. “They can’t raise them as a chocolate-covered White person. That’s what some folks try to do.”
Whitaker says he knows several White families who have adopted from Africa and have done a wonderful job raising the children by being proactive and making sure they understand their identity.
He says even if an open-minded family insists their eyes do not distinguish between different skin colors, the eyes of children at school will.
Whitaker says it’s important for adoptive families to recognize the differences.
“If that child is not equipped with a real sense of where they fit in the world . . . then problems can ensue,” Whitaker says. “Identity-type problems can ensue, and that’s dangerous.”
Going home
A couple of weeks after coming home, Jill is seeing the reality of having twice as many kids. There is more laundry. There are more messes to clean up.
There is more crying, but there is also more laughter. And she is handling the adjustment all by herself.
Art had to leave for Georgia for five months of training for a job with the Department of Homeland Security two days after his new family arrived home.
As her sons play with noisy monster trucks in the family room and down the hall Kayla tries to carry her little sister, Jill says she does not think race will be an issue in her family.
“They don’t know what color they are,” Jill says, referring to her biological and adopted children. “This is just how God made us. This is our family, and you can either accept it or not.”
Jill, who has returned to Ethiopia with all four children for a three-month visit, was lucky enough to find an aunt and grandparent of her adopted kids during a nearly monthlong trip earlier. The women gave her photos of Yednek and Elshidie’s father.
Yednek carries laminated copies of the photos with him around the house. Elshidie, 1, puts them in her mouth.
The children’s parents died shortly after Elshidie was born.
“They deserve moms and dads, too,” Jill says. “They can be anybody as long as they have opportunity. We have so much opportunity in America.”
