Decoupling Seattle Family Law and Divorce Blog

This American Life is not just the best radio show in America – the TV version might be the best thing on TV as well (sorry Dollhouse).

This week’s radio episode discusses a terribly sad story of international adoption fraud.  The story ends this past February, with a complicated criminal plea for four members of the adoption agency Focus on Children.  The plea calls for some restitution, and a ban on the workers to never again work in adoption, but no jail time. But the story starts with Elleia.

Just another cute pacific islander baby ... there are many

According to the Salt Lake City Tribune, Elleia (also known as Sei), daughter of Tupu and Isaia So, was a four-year girl from a big, rural Samoan family.  Elleia’s parents, who are Mormon, were told by an adoption agency that she would be sent to a Mormon family in America to go to school, write them letters and postcards, then return to Samoa at age 18. In a culture where children are often sent to live temporarily with wealthier relatives, this was suggested as a culturally appropriate decision. Elleia’s adoptive parents, Mike and Kari Nyberg, who already had two other sons, were another side of the same lie – that Elleia had simply been abandoned by her parents, and had been living at an orphanage the past several months. Her biological parents were told that she’d be spending one night in the city, to get used to her trip abroad, and then … just like that … she was gone to New Zealand, and then America.

Within days, Mike Nyberg knew something was wrong – because Elleia, who was just learning English – kept talking about sleeping at home, with her parents (not at an orphanage). He and wife asked questions, and eventually went to the authorities. Eventually, he took Elleia to meet her family in rural Samoa. It was very clear to Nyberg how much they missed and loved Elleia – and how they simply wanted the best for her.  This made it exceedingly difficult to figure out what to do.

So the Nybergs did something no one ever does with poor people – they let the Sos decide what they wanted to do.  Based on this, Mike and Kari ended up leaving Elleia with her parents – but came back and got her back later to bring her to her American home, in Spanish Fork, Utah again at the So’s direction). With the stress of the back and forth, and their whistle-blower role in the criminal prosecution of the adoption agency, however, Mike’s marriage was breaking down. Then, in part because Kari was not bonding with Elleia, he says, she ended up asking him for a divorce.  He says he gave Elleia’s parents a choice – she could stay with Mike alone in Utah, or with Mike’s sister, or return to Samoa. They wanted her back, so he took her, again, to rural Samoa.

Nyberg is unusual – his is the only of the 37 defrauded families to have returned the adopted child to Samoa. The radio interview is striking in how it showsthat despite him very much wanting to keep Elleia, he struggled, guided by his faith, to do the right thing in thoroughly uncharted waters. In fact, part of the reason why the adoption con artists got no jail time is that many of the other 36 families seemed to want the case over quickly, and were more worried about having their adoptive children taken from them than about attempting to right these wrongs. Not everyone has a taste for such messy moral ambiguity.

The great distances involved in international adoption – physical, cultural and above all financial differences – ensure that there is plentiful fraud all over the world. And how to undo that very tangled knot? At the end of day, it may be that Mike Nyberg’s insistence on giving voice to Elleia’s very poor parents made life even harder for this little girl, who spent about two years in Utah during two different trips before going home to rurual Samoa to stay.

But there’s something to be said for giving real decision-making power to her parents, good people who were lied to by adoption workers who never seemed to think twice about lying to them. And as Elleia’s tragic story shows, sometimes good people can find a connection across all these divides, and despite such fraud: this whole scandal has brought Mike Nyberg closer to the So’s.  He has since visited, with his other two sons from Utah. And the So’s extended family have had two more children – naming one Mike and the other Nyberg.

According to This American Life, Mike Nyberg hopes to bring Elleia, now 7, to the US for extended summer visits in the future – if her family wishes it for her. With a little luck, and a lot of love, Elleia may yet come to understand that she is loved by two very different families on opposite sides of the world.