WHY HAITI?

I was asked recently, why Haiti? This was my response:

Why Haiti? Why not Haiti? For me to describe why I would be willing to do this, I can only say that you will only know why if you ever get the chance for the most precious thing that can ever happen to you does; for a child to know that they are the most important thing in the world to you.

           

Every one of my children is worth everything and more. And I will not stop until they are 

all home and safe and healthy and happy and on a path to live their fullest lives.

           

Come smell the streets here. Come try to bathe and clean yourself in water that might 

break a microscope. Look into the eyes of people who outwardly look as broken as a 

human can possibly be by life and yet gracefully and joyfully hold hope in their hearts 

that their children will have a better life because of their sacrifices.

           

Life in Haiti can't be simply summed up by telling you it's "hard". That doesn't even 

scratch the surface. It is unjust. It is imbalanced. It is unfair. Based on the longitude and 

the latitude of our births, any one of us born into what we consider to be the struggle of 

our first world lives could have been born into the struggle that is a Haitian life.

           

We've made the choice to open our hearts and welcome the struggle. We knew going into 

this that it would be that - a struggle. But we also knew that there are 300,000 children 

in Haiti who need families. Many of them don't eat. If they eat, it's often mud made into a 

small round "cake". Many will never be educated. And they will likely die from ailments 

that basic healthcare would take care of. And turning our heads and looking the other 

way while we sip another latte or buy another outfit or happily splurge on a pair of shoes 

while a child walks in garbage with no shoes and tries to pull their next meal from a heap 

of cast off and rotten food is a bit too much for us to stomach. My children have a 

chance because we will give them the doors and let them open them and discover what 

their future holds. And it won't be mud cakes.

           

These decisions are not for just anyone. But they have been the absolute right decisions 

for us.

           

There are two kinds of people who come to Haiti. Those who are disgusted by what they 

see and smell and are afraid to touch. And then there are those, like me, who find Haiti 

to be home. And this home will never ever leave my heart. There is a beauty and a 

strength here that I have continually been touched by that is nearly indescribable. The 

respect I have for Haiti and her people is beyond comprehension.

           

My children will grow and prosper in America, but they are stronger than any American I 

know. They are rooted in forced slavery and come from a history of fighting for hundreds 

of years to live. Their spirit represents the ultimate survivalism. And if I can give them 

safety, and health and love, then we will all step back and watch them blossom and 

succeed.

           

They are my children. We are the lucky ones. That’s why.

Falsified Docs: It's not 5:00 and I don't care

The latest information we can get from our orphanage is that our documents are falsified.

In the past two weeks since we received our passports, we’ve been impatiently waiting for our documentation to be fully prepared to submit to the embassy. We had previously been told many times that our files were “embassy ready”, but we’ve come to find that several original documents are now missing. Djedly’s original birth certificate is missing. Djedly’s birth certificate extract is considered to be falsified. Parker’s birth certificate/Judgement is missing. Both of the boys’ adoption Acts, which are the proof that we have legally adopted them, are missing.

We have gotten several stories on where our docs apparently reside. There is a great deal of confusion and I yearn for the truth. The orphanage missionary has been really helpful and has literally looked through every single file and stack of paperwork to try to find the missing documents. But she has come up empty. She is just as confused as I am. She gave me permission one night this week to, “flip my shit”. It took a few rhum punches consumed at 4:30 that afternoon, but I ultimately found myself in the fetal position at the top of my stairs screaming silently into my hands in anguish.

At this point, I do not believe that these documents are just lost. I do not believe that Djedly’s document is a fake.  There are two people who could potentially be responsible for these documents missing. One is a woman who does the certifications with the archives office to have the documents signed by various government offices. The other is the crèche lawyer. He is reportedly a liar. The woman claims the lawyer has the docs, the lawyer claims the woman has the birth certificates. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle.  I truly think that the lawyer is a corrupt lawyer. I think that he is trying to extort money from the orphanage. I also think that there is more to this story than we are being told because we keep receiving conflicting stories. The lawyer has been described to me as a liar, and multiple agencies have confirmed that our orphanage has been trying to “phase him out” but that the orphanage is worried that he will “destroy documents” if they work too aggressively to get rid of him. SERIOUSLY?!!! Why does this man have anything to do with the delicate nature of the process to get these children home? If they know he is unethical and that he lies, he should never have been given more work to do. He reportedly has several files, including potentially, v’s file that was supposed to be given to IBESR. This lawyer is not the IBESR representative for our agency, and should never have been given files for our agency’s kids. I would like to get more clarification on all of this, but the director of our orphanage left to attend a pastor’s conference in the U.S. and has been gone for the past eleven days. He is supposed to return tomorrow. I am hopeful that he can get a handle on this situation, and somehow get the lawyer to come to the orphanage and hand over all the files he has. It would be interesting to know if he is owed money. At this point, I would do what ever I could to get my files from him and make sure that he never has anything to do with the process of bringing my children home ever again.

All I know at this point is that our agency received verification in July that Djedly’s birth certificate extract was “embassy ready” and would be in his file. It is gone. Without his birth certificate, we will have a harder time trying to get another extract for him. To get a new extract, we will have to go to the town he was born in, St. Raphael, and apply for a new birth certificate. This is the same process we went through for our son Parker to receive a Judgment, or replacement birth certificate. Then the same process for receiving the extract and certifications on the extract will have to be followed.

I’m highly suspicious of everything I’m told at this point. One thing that is very unclear to me is how it is possible that Djedly’s birth certificate extract is fake when the Immigration office uses two measures to determine the validity of a document prior to printing a passport. They scan a hologram sticker, and they use an infrared light to view an invisible ink on the document. Without these two things, passports are not obtained. We have passports. What is the truth? What is this lawyer really doing? What has he done? What has he not done? What does he have? What is lost? What is real? What is not real?

Friday at 5:00 I helped turn the office of the orphanage into a happy hour zone. We needed it. Cinnamon rhum is fantastic with apple nectar. It’s almost as fantastic as South African Cocopine juice with Barbancourt. And luckily, in a pinch, there is a ridiculous but rather special “man” wine that is available at the bodega across the street from the orphanage. To my homestudy rep and my adoption counselors who are reading this, yes, I’ve upped my alcohol intake.  And if anything I just listed sounds good to you, shoot me an email and I’ll bring some home for you. UNLESS you are with Children of All Nations. I’m not bringing you anything, because you suck.

Passports!!!

From the day I laded in Haiti, one of the immediate goals was to obtain the boys' passports. We have been told since June that all the documents the boys needed for their visas would be "embassy ready" when we received passports, and we thought it would be completely possible to have the boys home inside of September. That's why I came to Haiti.

In order to get passports, a file must have MOI (Ministry of Interior) approval. We entered MOI in March. We were told that we received MOI approval on April 21, but that several documents had to be fixed and go back through MOI. We were told that we received MOI approval again on August 2 and were submitted for passports on August 5. On the afternoon of August 5, I was told by the director of our orphanage, that we would have passports on August 7. Day after day we waited and heard one thing after another for why our passports were not available yet. Initially, we were told that we wouldn’t be able to get our files from MOI until Parker’s birth certificate extract was received and approved. We were aware that Parker’s birth certificate was not registered at Archives after his birth. What we were not aware of is that he didn’t have an original birth certificate. Even though Parker has lived at the orphanage for just over two years, his birth certificate wasn’t addressed until after he was legally our son. Something called a Judgment had to be obtained. It would essentially replace the original missing birth certificate. It had to be obtained, and recorded at Archives. Then an extract for his Judgment/replacement birth certificate had to be procured. The extract then had to be certified by three government offices before it could be submitted to MOI to release their files and allow for passports to be printed. We were told that we had an extract in September, but that it had not yet been signed. While we waited for three weeks for the signature, we were told that MOI and the passport office had agreed to start processing our passports so that they would be available as soon as we had the certified extract. We were told October 18 that we had passports but that they were mixed up with non-adoption passports and that they all needed to be sorted out and that the lawyer would bring us the passports the following Monday. After a week of waiting and continually being told that our file would be embassy ready as soon as the passports were received, I decided to call a lawyer. This was all sounding far too fishy to be true.

I notified my agency and my lawyer and I took our trip to MOI on October 29^th.  I spent the day trying to get more information on what is really happening with my adoptions. I went to IBESR and couldn’t get any verification that V’s file has been submitted. I couldn’t get any information on my own file and whether or not we have been approved.  And I left more frustrated than when I entered. The next stop was MOI, The Ministry of Interior. I looked through every weekly docket of every month for 2013. I was expecting to see proof that I exited MOI with approval on April 21 as we had previously been told we did. There was nothing that indicated that we had gotten approval that day. I continued to look through the logs and found nothing that indicated that we had gotten approval again on August 2 as we had been told we had. I looked through every single log until I got to the very last monthly file folder and the very last weekly log and I found my boys names listed for MOI approval on October 10, 2013.  I asked for a copy of the docket and was given a photocopy to show my agency, and orphanage director. This proof indicated that all of my documents would have been released from MOI on October 10, 2013. This was the docket that would have been submitted to immigration for our passports. There is no way that our passports were being worked on in the time frame leading up to this, because this docket is what gives Immigration the permission to print passports. Despite being told that MOI was “holding documents” until they received a certified extract, this was proof of the contrary. They release the whole file when it receives MOI approval.

I then contacted a friend who has connections at the passport office and found out that one of my son’s passports was printed and ready to be picked up. The other son’s passport was not logged into the system. This was perplexing at best and I was anxious to speak with the lawyer and the director of the orphanage to gain an understanding of why/how this has happened. When I got back to the orphanage that day I did not see the director, so I waited with my documented proof of our MOI exit and hoped that I could get some answers that day. I waited approximately five minutes, and the lawyer for the orphanage walked into the office. In his hands were two little blue books. I looked up and asked him, expecting him to smile and say, “no”, if they were ours, and he smiled and reached his hand out toward me and handed them to me. I opened them and saw two of the most beautiful pieces of evidence that my children are ready to come home. They were two blue little books of wonderful, their passports. Everything inside of me was happy and as I walked toward the back of the orphanage to share our news, I grabbed V who ran to me with open arms and a smile on her face and showed all the nannies the passports and received an overwhelming, “mesi jezi” (thank you Jesus) and lots of smiles. I then headed into the back yard of the orphanage to find my boys and prove to them that what I’ve said since I got here is the truth – I AM HERE TO TAKE THEM HOME!!! The nannies in the back shared their happiness and excitement and make proclamations of how “patient” I am and how they are happy that Djedly and Parker will be going home!!!

I have no idea why Djedly’s file was never logged at Immigration. All that mattered in that moment was that I had those blue books in my possession and I was not going to give them back. We expected that the orphanage would need a day or so to organize the documents and that we would be submitting to the embassy shortly.  We found out that many original documents are missing, and no one wants to take responsibility for it.

If I had known in those moments that the lawyer supposedly has so many critical documents that were supposed to be in the boys’ files and embassy ready, I never would have let him out of my sight. By the time I returned to the office, he was gone. I haven’t seen him at the orphanage since that day.  Before we knew that this was not the happy day that it should have been, it was the happiest day we have had in a long time. We are very thankful for these little blue books. We just hope that the boys don’t continue to sit in Haiti like so many of our friends children who have had passports for months, because their files are also lacking the finished products that the embassy requires for visas. There is no reason our children should remain in Haiti like this. It shouldn’t be like this. These blue books should be the proverbial “get out of jail” tickets and the visa should essentially be like a plane ticket.

Where we live

Let me give a brief review of where I live. I have a two-story studio apartment. It is a loft style “treehouse” of sorts.  The upstairs loft is like a tree house. It’s all wooden. It has lent the opportunity for the Magic Tree house series books that we read to feel a little more real. The upstairs bedroom is air conditioned at night, which is nice. It is such a huge luxury to feel cold in Haiti! We have no air conditioning from 6 am until 6 pm, but we do have fans and we use them! We have a tv downstairs, and in September we were upgraded to the luxury of a few cable channels and a new refrigerator that actually keeps our groceries cold!!! That was an awesome surprise. We get a wifi signal if we stand at the top of the stairway by the brick window, which faces the pool. But otherwise we’re unable to use the net inside the apartment and have to spend time outside if we need to do batch uploads of photos or download anything.  On a rare occasion we have a strong enough signal to watch a movie on Netflix, but it is usually interrupted several times for buffering and most of the time we lose the signal completely. We have watched every single DVD that we own at least six times. And the kids play their Nintendo DS’s a lot! We have lots of paints and crafts, but lets face it, there’s only so much time that can be spent doing the same thing over and over.  At night we hear gunshots. I assume it’s the security guard. Most of the time it’s just one warning shot, but other times there are several shots that make me wonder what the heck is going on in the twenty feet or so between my apartment and the alley behind us. I have no faith in the measly doorknob lock that is the only source of added security that keeps anyone from entering my apartment. If you can make it over the barbed wire wall, then you can certainly make it into my apartment.

Our apartment is on the end of a building, so we have an extra “window” which is actually just open brick with a screen. It makes for a rather exposed feeling and everything outside can be heard inside. Everything inside can be heard outside. And when the tape that holds the screen on the brick loses its stick, we share our happy little home with just about every Haitian creature imaginable.  I have lizards in my kitchen, mosquitos in my shower, in my room, in my kitchen, and even in my closet. I kill cockroaches, ants, termites, and millipedes regularly. The ants really like our beds. That’s less than awesome. The creepy crawly feeling should never be ignored. Just when you think it’s a whispy piece of hair, you find out that it’s actually an ant crawling on your forehead. Not awesome. We have all been bitten by different types of bugs. Luckily we haven’t had serious bites that have required antibiotics. I’m very thankful for that.  We have seen tarantulas here. Fortunately, I’ve never seen one inside my apartment. I am nervous that at some point one of the boys will lift one of the pool floaties up and find a surprise waiting for him.  Hopefully that will not happen. I’m not sure any one of the three of us will handle that well.

It has been interesting to see the pile of goodies that I’ve brought through the past two and a half years pile up and get some serious love and then find their way to Haiti trash heaven. I’ve brought big wheels and tricycles and floaties and all kinds of toys. We have certainly seen a fair share used by missionaries who think they can surf on our inflatable crocodiles. It’s funny for about five minutes and then one pops and everyone realizes that there is no Target right down the street to find another one at. So thanks, if you’re one of those missionaries. Please consider bringing a replacement with you next time. We all try to pay it forward here and would like to have a stack of toys to pull from that aren’t completely destroyed by someone who doesn’t take the time to think about how a fun inflatable toy for a child got here before you shredded it gnarly style in the deep end of the pool and then threw it’s limp carcass away afterward. And speaking of the pool, there are two open suction areas. One at the bottom that is begging to swallow a small toddler, and one on the side of the pool that is powerful enough to suck out your intestines. There are no caps. But that’s ok because even though the owners of this hotel know what little means it would take to make the pool safe, we’re in Haiti. So that doesn’t matter. Everyone should just swim at their own risk. But don’t be too loud when you play outside. Especially if you are a brown Haitian child. Because the white kids and the countless skeezy drunk old contractor men can be as obnoxious as they would like to be, but if you’re brown you will be chastised and asked to get out of the pool. We have had a couple of slumber parties with our cousins, and despite the many people who come stay here and have loud drunken parties by the pool, we have been chastised by the owner and asked not to swim several times.

In addition to the waves of horny contractors who raise their eyebrows and beers and ask me to join them at the bar, I have a steady flow of people who request my help and ask for money from me at the front gate.  Even the staff. Though I am fond of them and know that they are crazy awesome and significantly underpaid. It’s just really hard to constantly receive requests for things and money and help and yeah…everything.

I live above the bar and have put some decent thought into the idea of rigging a pully system with a bucket so that the bar tender can send up some rhum punch nightly. The rhum punch has been a lifesaver so many times. I usually drink it on the dreaded “drop off night” of each of my visits. However, I’ve taken to having one here and there when the shit really hits the fan and I’m in need of some good numbing medication.

I only get two very thin towels, but at least they’re washed and are fresh daily. I leave $2 a day for the cleaning staff and plan to leave most of the household goods with them when I can finally leave to go home. They are lovely people who check in on me frequently and hope to see me take the kids home. They were very happy to see us receive passports. And they give me a knowing look when I walk into the bar and ask for a rhum punch.

I need help, you need help...we all need help!

While living in country, there have been many things that I’ve learned. I’ve made arrangements for having my laundry done (a huge feat as laundry for four children adds up quickly), as well as learned how to arrange for safe trips to the grocery store and an occasional errand. I really miss my car. I have always been really good at using left over’s of everything to make stuff. And I’m a recycler. Those skills have come in very handy in my time here. There is no CVS, no 7-11 and no Target. Any and everything that I needed had to be brought with me. Or I have to supplement by purchasing odds and ends at the grocery store for a ridiculously inflated price. The kids and I have tried a variety of international products, such as cheese made of palm milk from Egypt, crackers and cookies from Brazil, Nicaragua, and India, butter and milk from France, and of course we try as many of the local Haitian goods as we can. Haitians have a very sugar rich diet and very sweet pallets. That will be hard to break when they come home. We don’t eat many processed foods in our home. And we rarely use sugar except for in baking.

Speaking a little bit of Kreyol has helped, although I have been very thankful for the English-speaking friends that I have in Haiti. One of the hardest things I’ve experienced in Haiti is that I am very easy to take advantage of. I have learned the hard way that I have to say no. I’m really bad at saying no, but after being taken advantage of and losing several hundred dollars through scams by people I thought were my friends, I’ve had to start saying no more.  I’ve known an artist who works selling art and crafts at the front gate of our hotel for over two years. He offered to procure some custom sculpture from me. He also borrowed money from J and then disappeared. I’ve seen him on the streets, but knowing that he owes me money, he hasn’t come back to the hotel to pay the debt or deliver the artwork I ordered.  There are also lots of people who show up hungry and in need of funds and resources at our orphanage, and I have heartbreakingly told them that I don’t have the ability to help them. It is a very hard and harsh experience to say no when I have so much. But good friends have reminded me that I cannot take care of everyone. I have a job to do here. I have five children and it is my responsibility to take care of them first. Still it is hard to pass by thousands of people in the streets walking through the puddles of rain and mess that ultimately terrify me. It is their daily life. And I sit in a vehicle, with the wind blowing through the open windows, in relative comfort and try to remind myself that I can’t do everything. What I can do is help support the right resources. Those are hard to identify. But they’re out there. There are so many good people helping Haiti.

One night I hit an emotional bottom. I returned to my apartment to find the grounds man I’ve befriended, but denied financial assistance to, standing near my door. He had come to tell me that his son had died two nights prior. He died because he was anemic. I am anemic. I've had several blood transfusions and for a spell of several months in 2011 I had to have weekly iron infusions. I couldn't handle knowing that his son died of something so preventable. My heart sank knowing that though I probably couldn’t have saved his sons life, I could have done something to try to help. But I chose to believe that saying no to him was best so that I didn’t have another experience like the one with the artist.  I learned so much from this man. I hugged him and tried to explain how much my heart hurt for him. And when we finished talking he went back out to sweep the grounds around the pool to remove small bits of trash that the other guests haphazardly drop and believe the wind will blow into the trash. His reality is just not fair. But there is no one who can fix that for him.

One Wednesday night recently I came back from the O and there was a man sitting on the wall outside of the hotel. He jumped up and ran over to the van and waved at me deliberately and held a note in his hands. I didn’t know who this man was, but I immediately worried that he was a friend of my friend Micheline and that he was at the hotel to tell me that she was hurt. She comes every Wednesday evening to have dinner with us and deliver our fresh laundry. I went to speak with the man when I got out of the van. He handed me a note from a hospital and explained in Kreyol that his 16 year old daughter had appendicitis and needed surgery the following day. He said that he needed $600 gourdes. I was baffled and wanted to know why this man seemed to have sought me out. I have had this surgery. I immediately thought of how Nelson's son died of anemia, something I live with, and I told myself thatI should help this man if I could. I asked him to wait and I took the note and went inside. I asked the owner of the hotel who this man was and he told me that it was just someone who was asking for money. This is a “new practice” in Haiti. When you need something you just go around asking until someone is willing to help you. This is not a “new practice”, as this has been happening to me the whole time I’ve visited Haiti. However, there was something very different about this man. His calm, but sad eyes spoke so many words. I went into my apartment thinking about how or why this man would have asked me for help. Had Maxo, the man who scammed me out of money sent him? Had someone told this man that a white chick at the hotel might be able to help him? Or was this man just a sad and worried dad who was looking for anyone at all who would be willing to help him? I looked at the note again when I got inside and I decided to look in my wallet to see if I could help him at all. $600 gourdes. What did I have that I could give him? I opened my wallet and pulled out all my Haitian money. I counted…$100 gourdes, $25 gourdes, $50 gourdes…I counted every single gourde I had and I had exactly $600 gourdes. No less, no more. I knew that I was supposed to help this man. So I took all $600 gourdes, which is roughly $13 US and wrapped it up in the note and took it out to him. He was calmly sitting on the wall when I went back out. I handed him the money and told him in kreyol that I hoped that his daughter would be ok after the surgery. He thanked me with those sad, but now hopeful and thankful eyes and as he turned to walk away I asked his name. He turned around and held out his hand for me to shake and said, “Joseph”. I told him my name and shook his hand and told him to have a good night.

So I helped a man, a complete stranger, by the name of Joseph, who sought help at an Inn. And I had exactly what he needed. No more, no less. Ask and you shall receive. He asked. He received. I am asking too. And I hope I will receive as well.

Crohn's Disease takes it's turn

September had arrived and we were not closer to any changes in V’s process. And we hadn’t received any notice of significant progress in bringing the boys home. I was feeling deflated. I had hoped to be able to bring the boys home by mid September at the latest.  By early September, I was starting to feel the signs that it was time for my regular course of Remicade. Crohn’s Disease is such an evil thing to experience. I was hoping that I would have the boys back in the U.S. in time for my regularly scheduled infusion. However, by the time the aches and pains started to set in, I was four weeks overdue for the medication.  I was coping daily with using topical remedies, like icy hot to dull the pain of inflammation. But on September 7, I took a hard fall down the staircase in my apartment and I realized that if my back wasn’t broken, it was time to get the infusion. I took a trip to the hospital in Port au Prince, Project Medishare, to have an x-ray. Thankfully my back was not broken. And luckily, I was able to meet and thank one of the many people who helped Veronika get the proper treatment that saved her life twice. It was at that hospital that my baby was given a chance to live again twice! Though I would have preferred to go there to spread my thanks under different circumstances, being able to say thank you was nonetheless a profound experience for me.  I decided it was probably a good idea to go home to the states to have my back checked out and to get an infusion. I made the arrangements to go home, but first I wanted to be in Haiti to spend Parker’s 13^th birthday with him. On September 9, I hobbled and carefully moved around but was able to spend the day with him and give him a small dose of birthday celebration. We had cupcakes. Though he was determined to tell everyone it was not his birthday, I persisted in telling him that he can change his name, but he cannot change his birthday.  On September 11 we found out that our extract had FINALLY been written. However, it still needed to be signed. UGH. Every victory here always comes with a “BUTTTTTTT we need eleven more things to make this document legitimate”…So on September 14, I flew home for my infusion hoping that upon my return we would have a signature and be well on our way to having passports in our hands.

Being home in Pittsburgh for a few short days was like walking through a dream fully awake. It was weird. I was so happy to see J and the kids, but it was that much more sad to experience a few days of what our lives should be. Knowing that I had to return to the struggle of trying to get to that point was so difficult. I infused, saw my Dr., and loaded up more baggage to bring back to Haiti and returned on September 18. Though the boys had been very well cared for by one of their favorite nannies, and had a few days of tv watching, game playing and freedom from mom; they showed me that they had really missed me. Parker told me that Djedly woke up one morning and said to Parker, “I really miss mom”. And Parker called me four times the first day to say that he missed me and loved me.  Apparently Veronika couldn’t wait to share her good news with me, but luckily Kelly caught her on video WALKING!!! After trying to get her to walk all summer long, she finally took the plunge and took her first independent steps the day before I returned. I had just purchased a wooden walker for her to the tune of $117 and another at Good Will for $2. So I instructed J to return the wooden walker and I packed the $2 one for her to use for added support…I can’t believe she started walking THE DAY BEFORE I CAME BACK!!! This is a huge sign of what I’ve always believed.  She will do things when she is good and ready.  Coming back was harder than I expected it to be. I was that much more out of patience than when I left. And NOTHING happened while I was gone. The extract was not signed and we were not going to see passports any time soon.

Impatiently waiting for our extract was a very difficult thing to experience. I’ve watched so many children “fly” through a system that I’m not even capable of crawling through. I watched a group of children leave for their passport photos one day and as I looked I realized that almost every single child in the group hadn’t even been born yet when my children entered the orphanage. This process is not fair. It is not linear. And it is so hard to let that sink in when you see the evidence so boldly presented to you in the simplest way. Such as a small group of unknowing toddlers carted off for their photos to be laminated in the all important travel book, a passport. They will all have the right and ability to leave this island before my boys will. And the harshest of these realities is that these children lacked a very important member of the group, my little v. she would have been part of this group if she had been submitted when her file was ready. She would have the right to leave this island before her brothers would. Instead she will remain here for likely a very long time. That sickens me.

Advocating for V

In an attempt to try to get some progress started for V’s adoption while I’m living in Haiti, our agency asked us to write a letter that would be delivered to IBESR. This letter was to explain our love for our daughter and our hope that we will be re-matched with her, all while not being critical of the office of the IBESR or of the Haitian government. This is the letter we wrote:

To Whom It May Concern:

I first met our daughter Veronika Macillon when she was brought to our orphanage shortly after her birth and her mother’s death in March 2012. We had no plans to adopt a baby from Haiti. I was visiting our two boys here in Haiti at the time and knew immediately that I had a primal need to take care of Veronika. I sat in awe of her as I watched and prayed and encouraged her to fight to live. She struggled to hold on to life for months. She was blind and deaf until she was almost three months old.  My soul ached for her to be my child for months and after multiple hospitalizations, my husband and I decided that even if we lost her, the mighty littler warrior, our sweet little Veronika needed parents. We could not let her die without a loving family.  Due to severe repeated breathing complications, bronchitis and pneumonia Veronika was hospitalized twice and almost died. In August 2012 when we found out about the second hospitalization and that she was on oxygen and feeding tubes, we started the process to adopt her. She was four months old. The day after we started the process to adopt her, after being told honestly that she might not live, she was miraculously removed from her feeding and oxygen tubes and was released from the hospital a day later. She is our miracle and has been on her road to healing ever since. 

In the months after we began the process to expedite her dossier, we were crushed to find that the director of our orphanage was unable to submit our file to IBESR before the closure deadline. Veronika’s mother’s death certificate arrived two days prior to the closure deadline and our file had not yet been legalized. When our file was not submitted by the deadline our orphanage was told that our match with Veronika would be honored, but that our referral was no longer valid and we would not be allowed to have her on our bonding trips to Haiti until after her file had been submitted to IBESR and matched under the new process. We waited for six long months for our file to be accepted under the new guidelines and the quota. Our file was accepted by IBESR on April 1, 2013. Our lawyer submitted our file along with a letter explaining our express intent and desire to adopt Veronika. We were told that our file would be evaluated and once we received approval Veronika would be matched with us once again.  We have not received any further information since our submission April 1, 2013. We greatly desire to be re-matched with our daughter.

 I average a visit about every eight weeks. In the past year I have come to Haiti eight times. I have spent as much time with Veronika as I possibly can while also raising two of our other children in the United States and spending as much time as possible with our two adopted Haitian sons. When I can come to Haiti, I sit on the porch of the orphanage and play with her. Because she has some developmental delays due to her illnesses, I try to encourage her to walk and play with toys. I also try to bond with her as best I can. I long for a time when I can have her with me and spend time properly bonding with her individually. I have been living in Haiti since July 2012 with the hope that we can make some progress with her case and that we will be able to work to bring her home. I try to spend as much time with her as possible while I am here. She knows that I am her mom. We spend as much time in Haiti as a family as possible, as the value of our time bonding is priceless. We have seen as much development as we possibly can and we cherish every moment we can spend together as a family. Veronika knows her siblings and her dad and we are all quite bonded as a family. Our American children have traveled to Haiti four times now and we have all been living with a heavy burden of the fear that we are not currently referred or matched with Veronika any longer. We hope that this dread will pass with news from your office that we will be matched with her again soon. I would sooner lose a limb from my body than leave my daughter behind. Please help us bring her home. She is almost eighteen months old. We desperately want to have our family together to continue to bond and grow.

Our express desire is to enable her to have every resource possible to keep her health sustained and make sure she has every opportunity for a strong and happy future. She is such a joyful and happy child. We were once graciously honored to be given the chance to be her family. We hope to feel that joy once again. We sincerely hope that we can provide the miracles she deserves and continue this process to adopt her. We want nothing more in the world than to unite our family and be given the chance to raise our beautiful and amazing children together. Veronika was a blessed surprise in our lives and we hope that all of this is one day a story we can tell her about the process to bring her home.

                                                                        Veronika’s loving parents,

                                                                                    Jen & JJ