Official: Jolie adopts Ethiopian girl
In a posting on People magazine’s Web site, Jolie is quoted as saying the child’s name is Zahara Marley Jolie and that she and Maddox are “very happy to have a new addition to our family.”
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Ethiopia, a country of 70 million, has more than 5 million orphans, their parents lost to famine, disease, war and AIDS — a catastrophe the government has said is “tearing apart the social fabric” of the east African nation.
Caring for the orphans costs $115 million a month in a country whose annual health budget is only $140 million. Because of that, Ethiopia has gone out of its way to make adoption easier.
In 2003, a record 1,400 children were adopted from abroad, more than double the number in the previous year. The number of private adoption agencies in Addis Ababa, the capital, has doubled in the past year to 30.
Ethiopia has strict laws to thwart dubious adoption agents and to ensure that the orphan really exists, that the paperwork is not fraudulent and that no AIDS-infected children are being passed off as healthy.
Agencies charge fees of around $20,000 per child, a relatively inexpensive fee compared to many other countries.