A Place to Call Home
It takes a special person to welcome someone else's child into their heart and home. Brooke Montgomery, who fostered and adopted children in three African countries, had an inkling that this was her calling when she did volunteer work at an orphanage in China after college.
Finding home
Several years later, when she was married and living in the U.S., she and her husband decided to adopt a child from Ethiopia since they were too young to qualify for adoption in China. They adopted a second child—this time in South Africa—and Brooke decided to make it her life's work; to help abandoned children find good homes.
After they moved to Tanzania, Brooke practiced law at a firm in Dar es Salaam and specialized in adoption. After a few years she started her own adoption society—the only one operating in Tanzania when I met her in 2007—and was facilitating over 20 adoptions each year.
Foreign-born couples accounted for only 20 percent of adoptions, she told me, mainly because the law required adoptive parents to be residents of Tanzania and it took time and perseverance to follow the legal process to its conclusion. Most abandoned children—e.g., those orphaned by diseases like AIDS and malaria—were taken in by relatives. If relatives were unable to raise an orphaned child, they might send him/her to a state or church-run orphanage (there were 17 registered children's homes in Dar in 2007). "Adoption is not very accepted in Tanzania because breaking family ties and giving up the family name is frowned upon," Brooke told me. "But foster care is acceptable to most Tanzanians, and it’s widely practiced."
Brooke believed that if a child had no relatives, or if the relatives were willing to relinquish family rights, it was more beneficial for the child to be placed in a loving and permanent home than to grow up in an institution. She told me with tears in her eyes about a Tanzanian mother with AIDS who was quickly declining when she handed over her eight-month-old baby to an adoptive couple. The mother was relieved to know that she’d arranged for her child to have a better future.
When she’d started the adoption society, Brooke and her husband had also opened a children's home next to their house that cared for 13 orphans and abandoned children. With five of their own in addition to the children in the home, Brooke and her husband counted 18 children who looked upon them as parents. In a country with a million children orphaned by AIDS and malaria, they gave as many children as they could a place to call home.