NORTH BAY BOH E MI A N | FE BR UARY 27–MAR C H 5, 20 1 3 | BO H E M I AN.COM
8
THE
Paper A NEW HOPE Beth Hall with her adopted children from the Congo, where conditions for children are dangerous.
Early Adopters
When a local couple traveled to the Congo to adopt a child, they returned with two BY RACHEL DOVEY
I
t’s 2:30pm, a time Beth Hall calls her golden hour.
The reason is simple: her four-and-a-half-year-old Tyler is at preschool, and everyone else is down for a nap. That includes three-year-old Piper, 18-month-
old Quinn and, as of this year, her newly adopted children from the Democratic Republic of Congo— three-year-old Grayson and twoyear-old Charlotte. From a bedroom down the hallway, we hear movement and a few cries. Hall pauses to listen. “I gauge who’s crying to see how
much work it’s going to be,” she says. Four weeks ago, the Santa Rosa mom and her husband, Mike, came back from the DRC with the two new additions to their family. With five children under age five, two of whom only speak French, the experience has been compounded
by the poverty and societal trauma that, until a month ago, was their adopted children’s present. And while this adoption no doubt marks a turning point for the two, it’s a transition that hasn’t exactly been easy. Hall began considering adoption when she was told she might never have children, an assessment that obviously turned out to be wrong. But even with biological children, the couple knew it was something they wanted to pursue. When they began learning of the massively underreported conditions in Africa’s second-largest country, they turned their attention there. Since 1998, the DRC has been the site of massacre and sexual violence so overwhelming that the few writers covering it tend toward comparison rather than digits. Incited by the same militant refugee group responsible for the Rwandan genocide, the First Congo War—sometimes called the African World War—involved nine countries, 20 armed factions and has claimed the lives of roughly 5.4 million people. A 2006 report commissioned by the UN relief effort UNICEF puts it like this: “[E]very six months, the burden of death from conflict in the DRC is similar to the toll exacted by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.” Though the exact number of rape victims in this bloody travesty is unknown, the report estimates them to be in the hundreds of thousands. “Sexual violence is consciously deployed as a weapon of war,” it states. Abortions are punishable by imprisonment, and yet women and girls who are raped and become pregnant often become social pariahs, rejected by even their families, according to the document. Considering all this, a scene witnessed by Hall makes tragic sense. She was in the DRC, in an area far from military occupation but still suffering from poverty that afflicts roughly 70 percent of the country’s population, according to Children’s Rights Portal.