Seven children who returned to the United States after being left to fend for themselves in Nigeria by their adoptive mother are restarting their lives in foster care, reports said on Wednesday.
The three boys and four girls ranging in age from 8 to 16 were discovered on August 4 living in squalor in an orphanage by Warren Beemer, a youth pastor from a San Antonio church who was in Nigeria on a tour of his church’s missions. The children returned to Houston on Friday.
Beemer said he was shocked to discover the children whom he recognised as American when he heard one of the girls speaking English.
”She said in a very strong, spirited way, ‘Houston’, when I asked where she was from,” Beemer said on CNN on Wednesday.
”She told us all her brothers and sisters were there and led us to a dark room where they just sat there along a wall looking at us.”
The children told Beemer that their mother, who adopted the two sets of siblings in 1996 and 2001, had taken them to Nigeria in October and enrolled them in a school.
A relative of their mother’s fiancé lives in Nigeria, Estella Olguin, a child protective services official in Harris County Texas told the Houston Chronicle. But he apparently deserted them, and the children were sent to the orphanage after their tuition money stopped.
The children’s mother returned to Houston about a month after taking them to the western African country. The Chronicle reported that the woman, who has not been charged with any crime, went to Iraq as a civilian food-service worker in April, but is now back in Texas.
She had been approved for the adoptions after passing an evaluation conducted by a non-profit child welfare agency in Houston, Olguin said.
Beemer told CNN that the children said their mother consistently used support money she received for the children to buy things for herself and had taken them to Nigeria because she didn’t want them any more.
The woman received monthly payments of $512 per child, according to the newspaper. The amount was based on their status as minority siblings wishing to stay together, which made them a special needs case considered hard to adopt.
Houston child protective services cut off the payments in March when the service learned the children were not living with her.
The children told Beemer they had informed numerous people in Nigeria that they had been abandoned by their adoptive mother, but they had begun to believe they would never get back home to Houston.
Beemer quizzed them about their lives in Texas. He said they talked enthusiastically about Houston’s professional sports teams.
Then, Beemer said, they put their hands over their hearts and sang the American national anthem.
”I promised them they would be going home,” Beemer told the Chronicle on Tuesday. ”I said, ‘Guys, in no uncertain terms, you will be going home.”’
Olguin said child protective services officials were trying to get medical and psychological care for the children and enroll them in school. Three of the children were treated for malaria after returning to Houston. ‒ Sapa-DPA