In 2005, the then 19 year old Mentewab Dawit Lebiso gave her daughter up for adoption in Ethiopia under mysterious circumstances.
In 2004, Mentewab was violently raped while staying overnight at her grandmother’s home. Mentewab was staying her grandmother’s home in the town of Shone to attend school, and was home alone the night she was raped. She later found out the unknown rapist impregnated her and was disowned by her family when her pregnant belly began to show. Mentewab traveled to the town of Hosanna to live with her cousin and gave birth to a baby girl in a nearby hospital on January 7, 2005 – Christmas Day in Ethiopia.
She named her daughter Yemasrech, which means “good news” in her native language, Amharic. When Mentewab’s mother Almaz Elfneh learned of her granddaughter’s birth, she had a change of heart. She traveled to Hosanna and convinced Mentewab to return to Awassa where Mentewab had lived prior to moving into her grandmother’s house. Almaz, Mentewab, and baby Yemasrech moved into Mentewab’s uncle’s three room hut where they struggled to make ends meet. Almaz cared for the baby while Mentewab worked during the day, but her earnings were hardly enough to feed herself or her baby.
“Sometimes all I had was a piece of bread all day” Mentewab told reporters back in 2007 through an interpreter. “My baby was crying all the time because she was hungry”.
When her uncle kicked the three of them out, Mentewab had reached her breaking point.
“I thought [the baby] was going to die because there was no food, so I ran away”, said Mentewab. Almaz couldn’t afford to care for the infant either and gave her up for adoption.
“After Mentewab left, I didn’t have money to buy her food, so the baby lost a lot of weight. She was really skinny. I was even thinking she could die. I went to the Kebele (the local council) and told them my daughter ran away and had left the baby with me. I said to them, ‘please take the baby before she dies’. They asked me to bring three people to witness that the mother had run away and that I could not afford to keep the baby”.
Here is where the story gets sketchy.
With the Kebele’s permission, Almaz gave the baby to a man she’d been introduced to by her sister-in-law, named Girma. Girma agreed to serve as the foster parent for the baby with promises that he would keep Almaz updated on the baby, and moved the baby to Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.
“He promised he would keep in touch. He said he would bring back the baby to visit after five months and he would send me a picture. He also promised to introduce me to the family that would adopt her”.
“But then Girma came to me and told me that the baby had been adopted and taken abroad. He said there will be journalists coming to you and you must deny the whole story and say it is not your granddaughter”, Almaz told reporters.