The process begins

Our journey to Laura began in the spring of 2004. We had two wonderful children – Alec, 8, and Keira, 6 – but wanted a third. We turned to adopting a girl from China.

We decided on China for several reasons. We had lived for a short period in China and made many friends there. Their adoption process had been overhauled several years ago and was now corruption-free and widely respected, and China has by some estimates 1 million orphans, about 95 percent of them girls.

China’s large number of orphans is blamed on the “one-child” policy in China, a policy instituted in 1979 to try to slow China’s birth rate, a problem in a country the size of the United States but with the population of 1.4 billion.

However, the problem is not so much the one-child policy as the gender of the one child.

In a country where parents go to live with their son’s family when they retire, if you’re going to only have one child, most people prefer boys. The result is orphanages filled to the walls with baby girls.

To its credit, the one-party dictatorship government of China has recognized this problem and works to facilitate international adoption of these “lost children”.

Once our decision was made we did some research and settled on an adoption agency based in Austin, Texas, called Great Wall China Adoption. Great Wall has placed more than 3,000 abandoned children with families – 700 in 2004 alone.

After signing up with Great Wall, the “paper chase” phase of the process began.

Documents had to be gathered, authenticated and submitted to the Chinese and American governments in order to be approved to adopt.

Most importantly, we had to have a “home-study”, done by a licensed social worker. She interviewed us in our home on July 16, 2004, in order to write up the report on our fitness to be parents. It’s amazing now to think that that was the exact day our daughter was abandoned. Finally, on Nov.5, 2004, our dossier was approved and received in China and the waiting began for the “assignment” of our future daughter.

Gotcha’ day

Our referral came May 25. Stacey was at home and the phone rang. It was Amanda from Great Wall.

“Ready to see your daughter?” she said.

Stacey and I rushed to our computer, holding our breath as her picture came on the screen. She was bright-eyed and cherubic, and the orphanage had named her Wei Hui (“colorful sunshine”). And, if we ever needed a sign, that she was meant to be a Beatty, it was there on the screen: She was wearing Sponge Bob pants. We decided to name her Laura.

Laura had been found abandoned before the gate of a government dormitory in the city of Hengshan, Hunan province, on July 16, 2004. She was in a cardboard box along with some clothes, powdered milk and a note from her mother. The note simply said that she had been born the day before.

She was taken to the local police station by the workers who found her, given a medical check-up and sent to the Hengshan Children’s Institute. On Oct. 17, the Hunan Daily newspaper published “her finding ad”.

Under Chinese law, before an abandoned baby can be put up for adoption, an ad must be placed in a local newspaper with a child’s picture, effectively giving the parents or relatives one “last chance” to claim the child.

Laura’s finding ad said, in part, “She has a square face and big eyes” and that “if after 60 days since the publication date the child has not been claimed she will be identified as abandoned and placed by law.”

We can only imagine the circumstances that led to her abandonment only hours after her birth and what her mother might have been thinking as she put the milk and clothes in her box with her newborn. But we know she cared about Laura, because she made sure to put her in a spot where she would be found.

We have no idea how Laura came to be matched with us – the matching process is one of the biggest mysteries of Chinese adoption. All that we were told that it is done in the central adoption office in Beijing.

This day – the one everyone waits so anxiously for – is known as “gotcha day.”

The eight other families came from Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Ohio, New Jersey and Illinois. Four had children already, four were first-time parents, and one was a single parent. One couple had been trying to have a child for 14 years. When the new father’s “gotcha” moment came in Changsha, I thought he was going to collapse in shock. But he quickly recovered and held his new baby. I rarely saw him let her go in two weeks we traveled together.

Our “gotcha” moment was certainly a magical moment in our lives. Of course we cried, but we also felt a great sense of relief – that she was in our arms, she now had a family and she was healthy. Admittedly, we were pleased that she seemed to have a twinkle in her eye, and as we soon found out, a ready laugh.

We took her back to the hotel and spent the next five days in Changsha taking care of paper work and getting to know our daughter. On July 12, we went back to the Civil Affairs office and the adoption was made official.

I’ll never forget the last question we were asked before the stamp was put on the adoption certificate: “Are you happy with your baby?” Have you ever used one word to convey the world? For Stacey and I, that one word was “yes.”

While we were in Changsha, I had a chance to visit Laura’s orphanage in Hengshan.

The caretakers there were friendly and loving to the children. Amazingly, Laura’s picture was still taped to her crib. Her caregivers pulled it off the crib and gave it to me, saying “Ba Ba, ba ba” (“father, father”). I was able to hide most of my tears behind the video camera.

Seeing Hengshan also gave me pause as to the life Laura was leaving and the life she was heading to. If Laura had not been able to be adopted, she would have been brought up at the orphanage until she was 16 and then “let go” into the world. But without a family, without skills, without support, where would she go? Most likely she would go to one of two places: a rice farm or a factory. She would have had no choice, no opportunity for choice.

Choice and opportunity – two things we take for granted. On the road from Hengshan to Changsha I realized what they really meant.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16