As mentioned in the last post, we want to share some details about how our thinking changed through the process of the adoption. Also, we hope to give enough information to help other people decide whether to pursue adoption in Peru. In this post, I'm going to intersperse the application steps and dates with what we were thinking at the time about who to adopt.
Our interest in Peru adoption began when we traveled to the Hogar de Esperanza orphanage near Trujillo in July, 2009. We began to discuss adoption as a possibility within days of returning home. The first week of August, we were searching the Internet for information and reading other families' adoption stories. Then we started contacting adoption agencies.
When we talked as a family, it became apparent that Chrissy and I were thinking of older children than our boys were. They each suggested someone who was among the youngest children at the orphanage. As parents, we were willing to consider children who were similar in age to our boys. We realized that each of us had a soft spot for someone with whom we had spent a lot of time. For example, on movie night at the Hogar, I had a little girl fall asleep on my lap, so was interested in her and her two siblings. On the field trip to the Moche ruins, Andrew was "buddies" with a boy, and suggested him and his sister. We agreed that we would probably have gotten interested in any child we had spent significant time with, and decided to keep our minds open to whoever was available. However, we also felt it would not work to adopt a girl who was entering her teens, or a boy who was older than Aaron (since that would make him the oldest child in the home because Andrew would be going off to college). A more difficult decision was whether to consider adopting a child with severe disabilities. Any child coming out of poverty and abandonment can have learning and emotional challenges, but there are some dear children at the orphanage who are nonverbal and will not be able to care for themselves even as adults. Although we had experience with children with such disabilities, we decided that at our age, and with other children, we shouldn't try to take in a child with severe disabilities. We did remain open to children with medical problems or minor physical disabilities. As it turns out, nearly every child we identified in our initial family discussions has since been returned to his birth family or adopted.
We knew two families who had adopted from Peru through Villa Hope, out of Birmingham, Alabama. We emailed Villa Hope on August 5, 2009 to request a packet of information. Pat Baldwin replied, and she has been our main contact. Other staffers at Villa Hope explained the paperwork and procedures, and handled the accounting. Villa Hope works through Maria Elena Baldassari as the attorney in Peru.
At the time, we heard about other families who were also working with Villa Hope. A few of the older boys at the Hogar had already been targeted by others. In a couple of cases, there was a letter of intent on file in Peru. For the Waiting Children (> age 5 or with disabilities) in Peru, adoption applicants can specify a particular child they hope to adopt. The letter of intent is a way to explain why you are able to provide the right environment for the child. (The Peruvian government is clear that their goal is to find the right family for the child, not the preferred child for a family.) Partly based on the feedback from Villa Hope, and other people we talked to about their adoption plans, we turned our attention away from the older children at the orphanage, and began to think more about larger sibling groups, who are also hard to place.
The first thing Villa Hope did that was a big help was to offer to clear up any concerns about health issues before we formally started the process. Due to our age and medical background, we might not have been approved to adopt in certain other countries. We provided some information about medications and medical history, and they sent it to Maria Elena to check with MIMDES/SNA. (MIMDES is the government department in charge of social welfare for women and children, and SNA is the national secretary for adoption). This informal advice was provided before we paid anything or began a home study. Everything checked out OK with SNA, but there are no guarantees until the final dossier is approved. We got the go-ahead to proceed in mid-October. (This is a step that probably cost us about a month in the process, and not everyone would have to do it.)
Next, we needed an Illinois agency to do the home study. We checked first with an agency recommended by someone at our church. However, they were not Hague-accredited, so we could not use them for Peru. Next, we inquired with a large agency that had been used by some of our friends who adopted multiple times. That agency had a social worker nearby, but they have a policy of not doing home studies that will be used by other agencies. So, we finally located The Baby Fold, located about an hour from us. Our neighbors had used them for an open, domestic adoption of an infant. Our social worker is Lara Raper. We first contacted The Baby Fold on September 15, 2009 and met with Lara beginning in November, after compiling necessary paperwork.
In our initial paperwork for Villa Hope, we had checked off a number of health issues that we would consider in a child. For instance, we said we would consider a child who is HIV-positive, whose mother had been diagnosed as mentally ill, or who had been abused. This surprised the agency somewhat, as most applicants apparently just check "no" on everything in an effort to get the healthiest child possible, while recognizing they might later be asked to consider a child with one or more of the items. Suddenly there was a new factor in our thinking. What if we were the only ones willing to adopt some child who was only stuck in the system because she has HIV? Should we be willing to look outside the orphanage we visited to consider other children who might be hard-to-place, but who fit our criteria? Pat Baldwin helped us to understand the situation. As of Fall, 2009, there were only a few waiting children in Peru with HIV, many more with an unknown parental history or who had definitely been exposed to drugs and violence on the street. However, Pat wrote "All of them need homes so it is good to look for a child that fits in well with your family."
We began our home study training by going to Normal, IL to the offices of The Baby Fold. Our first session was November 7, 2009 and our home study was complete on March 24, 2010. It cleared the State of Illinois in early April. We met several times with Lara, and she interviewed the boys and inspected our home. We learned general facts about adoption, discussed our parenting styles, and took in a lot of information about adopted children and their emotional and physical health. In December, 2009, we began a series of on-line courses specifically geared to those adopting older children (i.e., not babies) internationally. It was good to have the mix of detailed, authoritative presentations on-line with the face-to-face discussions with the social worker. We completed the on-line courses February 11, 2010. The period from November through February was an intense time of gathering paperwork. It felt like we were working on the adoption every day (or every evening). This is the time when if we were not serious about the adoption, we would just have given up. The best part was sitting together doing the on-line courses and having long discussions about parenting. It truly benefited our family even aside from the adoption.
One goal of all the education is to make sure you understand the challenges of adopting a child from an orphanage. As an elementary-school teacher, Chrissy was familiar with most of the material on childhood development, but it was all new to me. It was amazing to learn how just the inability to crawl freely can inhibit a child's ability to develop normal brain function. There's a lot I took for granted in having three healthy children. With this information, taking on two or three children at a time seemed like a bigger task. We asked to see some description of the children available for adoption. Pat sent us an abbreviated list of several sibling groups culled from the official Waiting Children list. From just the names, ages, and brief descriptions, we could see that there were many children who were behind in school, or whose emotional and physical status might signal additional needs. We requested and received more detail on two families. In one, the youngest child was below the age listed on our home study, so we found we could not have pursued that referral without months of delay. The other was a group of three children. We decided not to write a letter of intent, and to think more about whether we could actually handle three. We also hoped some more children would come available from Hogar de Esperanza, and were willing to wait.
Once the home study was complete, we began work on the dossier. There was not quite as much paperwork to do, but some of the tasks (e.g., getting employment verification letters, getting a psychologist's report) required us to contact other people and work to their schedule. So we did slow down a little in this phase. We might have been able to save a few weeks. On the other hand, government approvals moved rather quickly. Our home study passed through the State of Illinois in a matter of days. Our USCIS application went in on May 4, we were fingerprinted on June 2, and had our I-797 on June 7. Then we scheduled our physical exams and our full dossier was at Villa Hope by July 2.
We used a psychologist who had previously prepared a report for Peru. Some aspects had changed, either because of the Hague process or just changes from SNA. The psychologist met with each of our boys, and administered several tests, then met with us. Her main recommendation was that we limit ourselves to two new children. She was somewhat amazed at how different Chrissy and I are, and we said our marriage isn't perfect, but it's worked for 20 years! Thankfully the psychologist is in our college town, so she has worked before with dull academics like me. Early in the summer, we learned that additional children at "our" Hogar had been changed from "state protection" status to "under investigation for abandonment" status, the legal precursor to being added to the waiting children list. We decided to focus on those children, and hope and pray a couple of the younger ones would come available soon. However, we remain open to a match with other children who might have characteristics that are acceptable to us, but make them hard to place.
Villa Hope got the documents in our dossier "legalized" and submitted it to the Peruvian consulate. After one typo-related glitch, that was approved and returned, and sent on down to Lima. Maria Elena and her staff are in the process of translating some of the documents into Spanish for official filing. We could hear of final approval any day now, or SNA could request new information, which might push things back several weeks. There are numerous sibling groups waiting, and in July, only single children were placed. Villa Hope had three referrals recently, and heard from SNA that they are eager for more families willing to adopt multiples. All this gives us hope for getting a referral very soon after our dossier is finally approved.
