Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes...

These changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes
Nothing remains quite the same
Through all of the islands and all of the highlands

If we couldn't laugh we would all go insane.
~Jimmy Buffet

For those of you that know of all our troubles over the past two years regarding adoption, you can skip this post (unless you are a glutton for punishment). For those of you that missed out on our adoption soap opera, here goes...

I think that I will go back to the beginning, because it's like a river that you can never truly understand until you see where it sprang from the mountain-side. The following is an excerpt from an article that I have written for an adoption magazine (hopefully they will publish it, but who knows):

For most of my life I have felt something deep within me, a pull towards something—or someone. Over two years ago, my husband and I decided to adopt from Africa and suddenly that inexplicable pull within me made sense. I knew that there was a little soul, or perhaps two, waiting for us to find them there. In the spring of 2008, we thought that we had found them in the form of twin three-year-old Liberian girls. One had tested positive for Hepatitis B and although we had not initially felt comfortable with caring for such a special need when first completing our adoption paperwork, it is much different when the disease has a face and she has already snuck into your heart and grabbed hold. After researching the disease exhaustively and speaking with infectious disease specialists, pediatricians, and parents who had adopted children with Hepatitis B, and also considering the risks to our two biological sons, ages five and three at the time, we felt that it was something that we could manage.

We openly discussed the decision with our extended families. There was a lot of support, but there was also enough fear and doubt that we knew it would cause major issues within the extended family. My husband loved the girls so deeply already, and felt so strongly that it was God’s will, that he was prepared to move forward with their adoption. I was not. I loved the twins dearly as well, but what kind of family would we be able to provide for the girls? They would not have the wholeness of love and support that they deserved and I worried that the angels would feel the chasm caused by their adoption. Hepatitis B, though manageable and often never expressed, IS a disease with deadly inherent risks. Although we saw a little girl, not a disease, we also knew that our decision would bring risk that would not be a choice to others. So, at my urging, we let them go…and we forever lost a piece of ourselves in doing so.

We forced ourselves to move forward. We decided to switch countries to a new program our agency was opening up in Uganda. I had felt the switch would help us to move on from the girls (who have since been referred to a medical doctor and his wife, but have not left Liberia). New programs are a risk, especially in the predictable unpredictability of Africa, but our agency had worked in Africa for over two decades and had been sponsoring children in Uganda for 18 years. We felt relatively secure in the switch and the need seemed so great.

In March of 2009, we accepted the referral for a little girl, Angella, and her brother Samuel. They had no known birth dates, no pictures, and minimal background information but all medical tests had been completed. With a birth mother sick with HIV and unable to care for them, we felt that they needed us as much as our heartbroken family needed them.

Our family spent the next several months loving this little boy and girl that we had never met, inviting them into our hearts and home. Samuel and Angella became invisible members of the family, already accepted by my two biological sons as their new brother and sister. When we had first decided to adopt from Africa, I had read all the books and felt certain we were up for the challenge. I knew that adopting from Africa would be wrought with many unknowns such as ambiguous aging due to malnourishment and unknown dates of birth, little if any medical or family history, and process delays. The only certainty is that nothing ever goes as planned. Armed with this knowledge I did not let the unknowns phase me for it was to be expected.

We finally got pictures of four-year-old Samuel in May of 2009, but still nothing on Angella. We began to have serious concerns when our agency director and her daughter spent a combined seven weeks in Uganda and were unable to see our children. Samuel and Angella were supposed to be living at the agency foster house in Kampala, but when the agency director arrived she found the children had been placed by the Ugandan representative in a "private foster home" where only he knew their location. He had done this with a number of other referred children.

In the meantime, the Ugandan lawyer working for our agency had claimed to have processed our paperwork and believed that we could receive guardianship as soon as late October or early November of 2009. Our hearts and heads became tangled and confused as we suddenly felt the excitement of possibly bringing our children home soon coupled with a deep worry that something was still not right. We began to hope for the best, but decided to make sure that it wasn’t the worst.

We contacted a friend of a friend—a Kenyan high school teacher attending graduate school in Kampala—and asked him to try and locate the children and assess the situation. He is a delightful, bright and energetic man who embraced our family and our cause and vowed to find the truth. With our agency’s support, the Kenyan dogged the Ugandan representative, flung aside his lies and diversions, and finally exhausted him into allowing him to meet the children. At a pre-arranged time, they traveled winding back roads (no street signs) to a small brick house where outside waited a boy, approximately 5-6 years old and a young girl, possibly 3-4 years old, dressed in boys clothing. A woman was also with them. The Kenyan went to speak to the boy, who began to address him politely in English until being harshly reprimanded by the representative. The boy would say nothing else during the short visit, and the girl cried the whole time. The representative allowed only a few pictures before hurrying the Kenyan away. When our friend was able to scan and send the pictures to us we were horrified. The boy looked nothing like the picture of Samuel that we had (twice his size and different facial structure). I remember emailing the Kenyan, tears streaming down my face, writing simply “these are not my children!” Our Kenyan friend was quite certain the whole thing had been a set-up.

Though not as alarmed as we were, the agency director requested the children be moved back into the agency foster house. It was supposedly done and we received interim reports that they were doing fine. We did not trust the reports and asked our Kenyan friend, a man we had come to hold dear to our hearts and trust implicitly, to look in on them when possible. Every time he was able to visit the house (it took him a week just to find the house thanks to the agency representative’s attempts to derail him), the children were not there.

Our Kenyan friend and I urged our agency director to go to Uganda secretly and expose what was going on, but she was committed to traveling at a date that was already pre-arranged and known by the representative. In late October of 2009, our agency director traveled to Kampala. She arrived at the foster house at 1 a.m. to find it without power or running water and only four beds filled with children, instead of four times that amount. She contacted the representative and he said that he was angry at parents for wanting their children moved here and there and so he took all the children back to their relatives. It was apparent they were not coming back.

Since that time, it has been revealed that the Ugandan representative likely portrayed a number of children as orphans or relinquished children for referrals when they were not such, and faked their medical tests. In this elaborate scheme he borrowed children intermittently when needed to stay at the foster house, and was able to siphon thousands of dollars off of parents (who paid monthly foster care fees), and the agency (who repeatedly paid for utilities—that still never were paid for—and bogus employees, inflated school fees and incorrectly done paperwork). There was indeed a “Samuel” and “Angella” and they did “stay” at the foster house for a short time, but Samuel was moved back out quickly after being brought in and it is now evident they were not even brother and sister. Some of the children may in fact be orphans, but all are now in the care of pastors or relatives in contact with the representative and to get to them would likely lead to more extortion.

“How could the agency not see this?” you might ask. “How could you not see the warnings?” you might ask. Well, we did. They did. We just reacted too late and the representative held all the power. The agency director was suspicious of the representatives actions early on, but was trying not to alarm him for fear that the “hidden children” would be lost if he became wary. Part of the story that is not apparent is the elaborate lengths to which the representative went to camouflage his deceptions. Obviously, he was good at facades. He rented a house to serve as a private foster house where two babies were supposed to be living—moving in their cribs, toys, bottles and clothes for two to three days at a time and housing the babies with the biological aunt acting as their foster mother there while adoptive parents or the agency director were visiting. He would then move them back to their biological mother in another town when the visitors had left. He was also a man the agency had had a long, proven relationship with. He traveled around in a beat-up car with a trunk full of fruits and vegetables, handing them out to people in need whenever parents or the agency director would visit. Many who have met him initially held him in high esteem and saw a man working selflessly and tirelessly for the children.

So where do we go from here? Two years into the process, we have gone through four miscarriages (and yes, that is exactly how it feels…it is a visceral, devastating loss). We still have a room with beds that have not been slept in, toys gathering dust and dolls that have yet to be hugged. We have lost all the money we had painstakingly set aside for the adoption. But we still feel the pull. So, we are looking forward once more. A little…no, a lot more wary and a lot less starry-eyed…but not less hopeful. We believe that we had to follow this path in order to find who was truly waiting for us. We found a Kenyan brother who will forever be a part of our family. We found within ourselves strength to overcome emotional and financial loss and persevere when the hour seemed darkest. We have begun to search waiting child lists, like rainbowkids.com, and have realized there are hundreds of children with special needs already in the system, just waiting to be found. For many, the only special need that they have is to find a family simply willing to discover the joys of adopting a toddler or older child. We are convinced that there are two little souls waiting for us and that we will find our happily ever after.