The innocents

Just a few years ago, 80% of the children who ended up in Sudan's orphanages died from neglect – simply because they had been born out of wedlock. But growing pressure has resulted in a recent fatwa that is starting to change all that, giving these youngsters a chance to shake off a deadly social stigma

CHANGING TIMES: Abandoned Sudanese youngsters are benefiting from a change in the way they are viewed by society. One result is that nurses at orphanages have been trained to play with children as they care for them, a practice that was rare in the past

LIKE so many babies at the Maygoma Orphanage in Khartoum, Nariman Siddiq Ahmed Ali was brought here the day after he was born, sickly and barely alive, weighing less than four pounds. Strangers found him in late February after he was dumped at the side of a road in a far-flung suburb of Sudan's booming capital. Almost certainly he was the product of an illicit union, the writhing, irrefutable evidence of adultery or fornication in a county where that could mean a lifetime of shame or even death – for the mother and the child.

Just a few years ago, chances were that Nariman would have perished at Maygoma, a fate, according to Unicef, that befell four out of five of the children unlucky enough to end up there. Orphans at Maygoma faced a Dickensian existence of want and neglect, many growing up badly stunted and nearly mute, cared for by workers who barely spoke to them and never held them, recoiling from them much like the society that viewed them as irredeemably corrupt by dint of their unfortunate birth.

But in the last few years a radical shift led by an unusual coalition of government officials, Western aid organisations and religious leaders has taken place here. It has rescued many of Maygoma's infants from a grim fate by transforming religious and legal attitudes towards illegitimate children in this deeply conservative society.

Social customs here have traditionally passed the sins of the parent on to the child, making adoption – already a complex issue in Islam, which emphasises family ties of blood – largely out of the question. But under this new approach, Nariman, who lies burbling in a cot he shares with a pink teddy bear, gaining weight and being cooed over by nurses, waits not for death or a life of despair but for placement in a foster home and eventually a family to take him permanently.

"It really is a social revolution," says Mona Abdullah El Faki, a government social worker who supervises the foster care of children from Maygoma. "It was very difficult to persuade people that adoption is not forbidden in Islam. There are a lot of misconceptions."

Few religions demand their adherents to contribute to charity as strongly as Islam, and caring for orphans brings special blessings. But Islamic law also forbids adoption in the Western sense, in which a child is absorbed into the adoptive family on an equal footing with birth children. The blood relation between birth parent and child, and all the rights and responsibilities it confers, is sacrosanct and cannot be imitated, according to legal scholars here.

As a result, say social workers, a child in Sudan raised by a family other than its birth family cannot be given that family's name, nor can that child inherit the adoptive father's property as a birth child would. In addition, an adopted son, once he turned 18, would not be permitted see his mother or sisters uncovered, since they lack a blood relationship that would bar them from marrying, and an adopted girl would face similar problems of having to cover herself in front of male family members. Adoption by foreigners is also forbidden.

This thicket of legal issues has led some Muslims to conclude that the whole idea of taking a child permanently into one's home is haram, or forbidden, under the laws of Islam. This is especially true in countries like Sudan, where the Islamic Sharia code is the law of the land.

To change those attitudes, the government, helped by Unicef and some local aid organisations, consulted with hundreds of religious and social leaders, met with women's groups, went to high schools and encouraged the news media to visit Maygoma and see the terrible conditions there.

"It was no place to raise children," says Osman Abu Fatima, a Unicef programme officer. "There were children who could not speak because no one talked to them. Some were malnourished. All were unloved. No one touched or held them. After my first visit I was traumatised by it for a long time."

All that has changed. Admissions to the orphanage have held steady between roughly 500 and 700 a year, according to Unicef statistics, but the orphanage has been renovated, and its nurseries are decked out with Snoopy clocks and Care Bears posters on walls painted bright yellow, pink and blue. Nurses are trained to hold and play with the children as they feed and care for them. Medical care has vastly improved. In 2001, 479 children died; in 2006, that figure was 186.

In 2004, the government passed a new law that said children should be raised in families, not institutions, as much as possible. But the most significant change came in 2006, when Sudan's highest religious body, the Fatwa Council, issued a decree that changed the way orphans were viewed in Sudanese society.

In the past, only children whose parents were known to have died were considered orphans in the Islamic sense, and only such children were entitled to the charity demanded of Muslims. But the fatwa ruled that abandoned children should be considered orphans too, which meant all of society had a duty to care for them.

The fatwa also declared that pregnancy in and of itself was not sufficient evidence to convict a woman of adultery, and that children born out of wedlock should not be made to suffer the consequences of their parents' sins.

These changes have meant that women like Fatima Mohammad Abdel Rahman have welcomed children of unknown parentage into their homes in a way that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. The 40-year-old Rahman and her husband have been trying for years to conceive a child, and she had all but given up hope of ever having a family until she heard a radio programme about fostering through Maygoma. "Family is very important in our society," she says. "A home with no children is a very bad place."

When she and her husband brought a boy named Khalid home as an emergency placement, Rahman worried her husband would be uneasy. "But he said, 'It is very important for us to adopt this child. God loves all children.'"

Still, changing the laws, both civil and religious, has been easier than changing people's attitudes. Many women, particularly those who have been unable to conceive, embrace foster parenting and adoption. But husbands often take more convincing.

Khanssa Sandal has been a foster mother to seven children, the latest being Muayid, whom she took in when he was two months old. He is now more than a year old and ready to be adopted permanently. But Sandal's husband, a trader who lives much of the year in Saudi Arabia, will not allow her to adopt the boy. "Each time it gets more painful to say goodbye," she says, clinging to big-eyed Muayid, who hides in the folds of her shawl. She goes over to a cabinet and pulls out a stack of photographs of all the children she has taken in. The fifth, a boy named Siddiq, was her favourite. "I wanted to adopt him but my husband refused," she says. "I cried for weeks. I still miss him."

Officials in Sudan hope to persuade the families of children born out of wedlock to accept and raise them, but the crisis of abandonment continues virtually unabated. Now more than half are adopted by others, and a rising number have been reunited with their birth parents, something that is only possible when a family member brings the infant to the orphanage rather than dumping it somewhere to be found.

"We need a fundamental social change," says Hamad al Neer Haider, who works at Maygoma. "As a society we need to stop throwing away innocent babies."

Children of the world

Children in the developing work are suffering because of the so-called 'Madonna effect', as parents send them into orphanages in the hope they will be adopted by wealthy Westerners. But Madonna, who controversially adopted Malawian toddler David Banda in 2006, isn't the only celebrity who has adopted children from overseas. Angelina Jolie has children from Vietnam, Cambodia and Ethiopia. Meg Ryan adopted a girl from China in 2006, and Ewan McGregor adopted a girl from Mongolia.

But it seems their good intentions could be misguided. "Some argue that international adoption is a solution to the large number of children in institutional care, but we have found the opposite is true," says Professor Kevin Browne, of Liverpool University. His group's findings likened international adoption to a 'trade' that should only be used as a last resort because it can be damaging to children.

MEET THE PARENTS

• Korea One of the earliest waves of international adoptions took place during the Korean war (1950–53) when families in Europe and the US adopted 200,000 Korean children.

• Vietnam In the 1970s, Americans adopted thousands of Vietnamese children who had lost their parents in the war.

• Romania TV footage of miserable conditions in Romanian orphanages after the fall of the Ceausescu dictatorship in 1989 encouraged thousands of Britons to adopt.

• China Adoptions by foreign nationals increased soon after the Chinese authorities announced their one-child-per-family rule. Western couples adopt more children from China than from any other country.