10 May 2006
blanc, blanc!
Gotcha Days are not all alike. We dream of them as we are waiting. Even though these days international waiting parents are usually on at least 67 listservs on which they learn that none of the process resembles a Hallmark card movie special, there is no way to know in advance what your Gotcha Day will be like. You have to go there to know there, as they say.
I met Three and Six for the first time in the bowels of the Miami airport. Their adoptions had been "in process" for about two years. It had been a wild and woolly ride.
Getting international adoption paperwork done is always a slow, frustrating, complicated, annoying, messy process. People who adopt internationally are poked and prodded by layers of government most people have never heard of. (Quick, tell me--where would you go to get a notarization apostilled? Yes, that is English! No, I didn't make it up.) And that's just the U.S. side. Haiti is a difficult country to adopt from for all kinds of reasons. It is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere and right up at the top of the list of the poorest countries in the world. This means, among other more important things, that its bureaucracies are non-digitized, to say the least. Everything is done by hand, in person, and almost always without personal appointments. You show up and get in line, and that's your day. Maybe you get whatever it is done that day, and maybe you don't.
The child needs a dossier in international adoption too, and in Haiti, the required paperwork is extremely difficult to come by. Whereas in the U.S., most people could lay their hands on their birth certificates or marriage licenses without too much trouble, people who can't feed their children in Haiti often don't have official (costly) paperwork. They have to plead with orphanage directors to take their children in; it is (always) a matter of life and death. If their pleas are successful, the orphanage staff must then begin the arduous task of tracking down paper records--paper and ink baptism registries kept in boxes in hot, damp church offices, for instance.
And then there can be other difficulties. Three and Six were in an orphanage whose U.S. director decided to quit. That made for many months of anxiety, dread, hopelessness, despair, grassroots campaigning, banding together with other desperate adoptive parents in waiting. For a long time, it looked like it wouldn't happen: these kids who had been told about their new family, who'd seen pictures and received gifts and written letters--these kids might never get out of Haiti, might never escape a life of vicious bone-grinding, death-dealing poverty. And they were my kids--I don't know if people who have never done an international adoption can believe, much less understand, that it's possible to deeply love a child you have never met.
But you can.
So I grieved, and I wrote. I despaired, and I emailed. I raged, and I telephoned.
And got lucky.
And there I was, in the bowels of the Miami Airport. So many people waiting there at the Immigration gate--with balloons, baskets of food, big signs of welcome, tense faces of anxious expectation--penned up and guarded, lest, no doubt, we indulge in un-apostilled dances of joy when our loved ones appeared at the end of the ramp.
Three and Six! Led up the ramp by two kind women pushing a luggage cart. Three held her head proudly--conscious of the intricate many beaded hairdo the women at the orphanage had spent hours on before her departure. Six shuffled his tiny feet in flip-flops at least 2 sizes too big and looked bewildered but clutched the hand of one of the women.
I'm suddenly hugging the kids that not two months ago I was trying to resign myself to never seeing in this lifetime. I'm hugging, and two very burly and very unsmiling uniforms are suddenly looming over us.
"Please," says one of the kind women I'd "met" only on email who were escorting my kids from Haiti to me, "she's meeting her children for the first time."
"GET BACK BEHIND THE LINE!" rumbles Burly Uniform 1 as Burly Uniform 2 puts his hand on his nightstick and looks bored.
Oh--that line. The one 10 inches behind me. Ok. We scootch back. I thank the kind women, who rush off to meet their connection with smiles and waves and congratulations.
It takes us a long, long time to get to the in-airport hotel. Six is so tiny, he can't walk very fast and I haven't brought a stroller, not realizing how far we'd have to walk. They are patient, stunned, good-humored.
Six, needing to get my attention at one point, tugs on my hand and says, "Blanc! Blanc!!"
Three is mortified. She glances quickly at me, then turns to him. She speaks to him swifly and adamantly in Kreyol. I have the rudiments, and can follow what she says. "No, no, not 'blanc!' She is 'Mama!'"
Gotcha!
I met Three and Six for the first time in the bowels of the Miami airport. Their adoptions had been "in process" for about two years. It had been a wild and woolly ride.
Getting international adoption paperwork done is always a slow, frustrating, complicated, annoying, messy process. People who adopt internationally are poked and prodded by layers of government most people have never heard of. (Quick, tell me--where would you go to get a notarization apostilled? Yes, that is English! No, I didn't make it up.) And that's just the U.S. side. Haiti is a difficult country to adopt from for all kinds of reasons. It is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere and right up at the top of the list of the poorest countries in the world. This means, among other more important things, that its bureaucracies are non-digitized, to say the least. Everything is done by hand, in person, and almost always without personal appointments. You show up and get in line, and that's your day. Maybe you get whatever it is done that day, and maybe you don't.
The child needs a dossier in international adoption too, and in Haiti, the required paperwork is extremely difficult to come by. Whereas in the U.S., most people could lay their hands on their birth certificates or marriage licenses without too much trouble, people who can't feed their children in Haiti often don't have official (costly) paperwork. They have to plead with orphanage directors to take their children in; it is (always) a matter of life and death. If their pleas are successful, the orphanage staff must then begin the arduous task of tracking down paper records--paper and ink baptism registries kept in boxes in hot, damp church offices, for instance.
And then there can be other difficulties. Three and Six were in an orphanage whose U.S. director decided to quit. That made for many months of anxiety, dread, hopelessness, despair, grassroots campaigning, banding together with other desperate adoptive parents in waiting. For a long time, it looked like it wouldn't happen: these kids who had been told about their new family, who'd seen pictures and received gifts and written letters--these kids might never get out of Haiti, might never escape a life of vicious bone-grinding, death-dealing poverty. And they were my kids--I don't know if people who have never done an international adoption can believe, much less understand, that it's possible to deeply love a child you have never met.
But you can.
So I grieved, and I wrote. I despaired, and I emailed. I raged, and I telephoned.
And got lucky.
And there I was, in the bowels of the Miami Airport. So many people waiting there at the Immigration gate--with balloons, baskets of food, big signs of welcome, tense faces of anxious expectation--penned up and guarded, lest, no doubt, we indulge in un-apostilled dances of joy when our loved ones appeared at the end of the ramp.
Three and Six! Led up the ramp by two kind women pushing a luggage cart. Three held her head proudly--conscious of the intricate many beaded hairdo the women at the orphanage had spent hours on before her departure. Six shuffled his tiny feet in flip-flops at least 2 sizes too big and looked bewildered but clutched the hand of one of the women.
I'm suddenly hugging the kids that not two months ago I was trying to resign myself to never seeing in this lifetime. I'm hugging, and two very burly and very unsmiling uniforms are suddenly looming over us.
"Please," says one of the kind women I'd "met" only on email who were escorting my kids from Haiti to me, "she's meeting her children for the first time."
"GET BACK BEHIND THE LINE!" rumbles Burly Uniform 1 as Burly Uniform 2 puts his hand on his nightstick and looks bored.
Oh--that line. The one 10 inches behind me. Ok. We scootch back. I thank the kind women, who rush off to meet their connection with smiles and waves and congratulations.
It takes us a long, long time to get to the in-airport hotel. Six is so tiny, he can't walk very fast and I haven't brought a stroller, not realizing how far we'd have to walk. They are patient, stunned, good-humored.
Six, needing to get my attention at one point, tugs on my hand and says, "Blanc! Blanc!!"
Three is mortified. She glances quickly at me, then turns to him. She speaks to him swifly and adamantly in Kreyol. I have the rudiments, and can follow what she says. "No, no, not 'blanc!' She is 'Mama!'"
Gotcha!
