Where We Belong (11 page)

Of the twenty-two children in the crèche, half had been matched with a family but were waiting for paperwork to be completed. By the end of that year, 310 children would be adopted from Haiti through agencies, but an estimated 380,000 orphaned children lived in the country. The next morning, Craig noticed a charismatic boy named Amelec in the play yard. He seemed bright and brought real energy to the crèche. While Gina called the kids for breakfast, Craig logged on to the facility’s computer to check for a response from Kathi.

First of all I am glad you are safe and I, too, am disappointed that I am not sharing this experience . . . and to think that little girl did the fancy walk, maybe she has been waiting for you. I will totally trust your decision, so if she is the one, I am thrilled.

It was important to Kathi that Craig make the decision first to adopt. She found in their relationship that when he initiated a plan, the results were far more positive than when he felt something was being forced upon him.

That morning at breakfast, Craig asked Gina how to start the process of adopting Esperancia. He spent the next few days going with her to preschool and playing in the yard. Sitting next to her one night at dinner, he was quite impressed with all of the children’s manners and polite demeanor. Craig also spent time with Amelec, who appeared to be naturally athletic and loved throwing the ball back and forth. Gina told Craig that Amelec’s grandparents had dropped him off at the crèche two and a half years earlier and that he was now five years old.

“When I found out he was available, I thought,
He isn’t any longer
,” Craig says. “We played catch together and I think it was the first time he’d ever played catch. It was really fun; we just connected.”

It was time to e-mail Kathi again. He had more big news.

I spoke to Gina this morning and you have a daughter. I also have some other news—we also have a son. Remember that kid Amelec I was telling you about? Well, I was shocked but Gina told me he is available. Apparently he has a horrible picture on the web page and no one has taken him. You will love this kid. He is stocky-athletic and a winner. He has a face full of energy and emotion. If you are really adamant and you need some time about this we can find a way to put this on hold, but I think you are just going to have to trust me on this one. I love you and you will be the best mom any kid could have. I have known that for 17 years.

One month away from turning forty-eight, Kathi was about to be a mother of two, sight unseen.

“Craig is my partner, so even though I wasn’t there, I was there; not physically, but every other part of me was there,” Kathi explains. “We were sharing our hearts together; we were just thousands of miles apart.”

Gina invited Craig to visit several orphanages in Port-au-Prince so he could appreciate the unique and special aspects of Enfant de Jesus. But before they went to an orphanage, she brought Craig to the city’s general hospital for a tour of the ward for abandoned children. He was repulsed. Deranged and deformed children screamed with little hope for comfort. The filthy ward was riddled with flies and horrific sights that so unnerved Craig that he didn’t even remember their return to the parked truck.

“It just rattled me. You want to talk about something on the fringe of humanity—and everybody was just accepting it. That’s what really got to me with everything,” Craig says. “There seemed to be this general attitude that this is the way it is and we have to live with it.”

Next, an orphanage. Shocked and sickened, Craig couldn’t wait to leave. The facility was jammed with hungry children who were offered no comfort or stimulation. When Gina saw a young girl there who was supposed to be signed over to Enfant de Jesus, she became irritated. She told Craig they were going to pay a visit up the street to the monsignor who had gone back on his word. It was there that Craig saw a newborn baby swaddled in a blanket and propped up against the wall in a corner. The baby looked pale and sickly. Craig noted that despite a rash across his forehead, the baby’s face was sweet and his eyes were alert. The monsignor said the infant had been found on a nearby doorstep and brought to the orphanage, which was ill equipped to care for older kids, let alone a newborn. Gina picked up the baby, hugged him, and handed him to Craig. She told him to go to the truck and she would complete the paperwork necessary to transfer the infant to her crèche.

“When we rode home that late afternoon,” Craig recalls, “he held on to my thumb for dear life. He was really sick, but he wouldn’t let go. I knew that kid was a fighter.”

When they walked into the crèche, the staff hovered over the baby, dressed him in soft pajamas, and began calling him Little Craig. After dinner, Craig e-mailed Kathi about his extraordinary day and how Gina rescued Little Craig.

Gina thinks he has a really good chance of surviving now that he is here. I know you have said all along that you don’t want an infant, but this is a magical kid.

“On the third or fourth day,” Kathi says, “when I got the e-mail about the baby—because keep in mind, this is a guy who wouldn’t come with me to babysit my nieces or nephews, he wouldn’t go to a restaurant and sit next to kids, he just wasn’t a kid person—I thought,
Oh my gosh. He has no idea what he’s getting involved with
. I was close to fifty and he was fifty-one. I didn’t have my own babies, but I’ve been around a lot of babies, and they’re a ton of work. That was the only one where I said, ‘You need to come back and we need to talk about the baby.’ ”

The next morning, over a quiet breakfast, Gina told Craig she felt the baby belonged to him and Kathi. Craig wasn’t startled. He felt in his heart it was true. But he told Gina that he’d promised Kathi he would not adopt a baby. Gina told him that sometimes things just defy logic and then got up from the table.

Craig’s emotions were in overdrive. He was being exposed to so many things that were the extreme opposite of the life he’d been living one week earlier.

“I was shrinking. I was mentally and emotionally in complete atrophy, and then here I was thrust into this environment that was so stimulating,” he says. “There was so much to consider and to think about—it was the opposite of going to one of these muted cocktail parties where we were all on autopilot. My emotions and my thinking about everything were electric. It was like all these lightning bolts going off.”

Craig and Kathi exhausted their computer keyboards hashing out the potential adoption of a baby. In the end, they agreed that Little Craig, whom they renamed Quinn Lucien Juntunen, was meant to be part of their new family. His blood test came back clean, which meant the adoption could go forward.

“We had no idea about the certainty of any of these kids,” Craig says, “but we agreed and committed to love them under any circumstances, which is the exact same platform that a parent who gives birth to kids goes into parenting with. Kathi and I felt we were going to love these kids and give them whatever we could to offer them the best chance at a productive life. Whatever was compromised . . . that to us didn’t enter into the equation. Our plan was to give these kids what they didn’t have, which was love and encouragement and role models. When I look back, the greatest gift my parents gave me was the gift of encouragement.”

Gina and Lucien told Esperancia and Amelec that Craig was their new dad and that they would soon meet their new mother.

It was one of the most special and memorable moments of my life. They were both so happy and excited. I love you, Kathi, and the fact that we are now going to raise these kids together. Sleep tight, baby. I will be dreaming of you and our new family and all that lies ahead.

By summer 2006, Craig and Kathi had been to Haiti several times to visit the kids, waiting for the wheels of international adoption to turn and allow their family to begin life under the same roof. Kathi’s initial trip to Haiti exposed her to the poverty and anguish Craig had described in his e-mails.

“We were doing a tour of the village and I saw this mom meticulously making these little patties,” Kathi says, “and I didn’t know what they were. I asked her through a translator what she was making. She said, ‘They’re dirt pies—mud pies.’ I asked her why. She said, ‘If my children are going to die because I can’t feed them, I’d rather them die on a full stomach than an empty stomach.’ That just really, really hit me.”

When she arrived at the crèche to meet their kids for the first time, Kathi had an unexpected rocky start with Esperancia.

“In her little mind—the mind of a four-year-old—she had this whole vision of her dad and her and maybe a brother, but there was no picture of me in that little dream,” she says with a laugh, looking back. “So, when she saw me for the first time, she took one look at me and started crying, like,
Who are you and why are you in my world?
”

The next visit went smoothly. Espie, as they called her, warmed up to Kathi and the almost-family-of-five continued to learn about one another and all the moving parts required to develop love and trust. Saying good-bye after each visit was not easy on any of them.

“It was confusing for Espie and hard on Amelec,” says Craig. “He was devastated. I’ve never heard a kid cry like that. They had a hard time with trust right from the get-go because, who can they trust? The nannies in the orphanage came and went, so there were no real constants in their life other than the kids who were around them.”

It took twenty-six hundred miles and seventeen years for Kathi to meet Craig the Kid Guy. The crèche offered her a look at him so seemingly far out of his element and yet so completely in it.

“It was really neat to see that side of him,” she says, “and to see how great he was with all the kids—not just our kids. I hadn’t seen that side so it was like seeing a new person.”

The couple did all they could to ready their Scottsdale home for the kids’ eventual arrival. Kathi decorated rooms for Amelec and Espie; Quinn would sleep in a crib in their room. The couple took control of what they could, like gathering educational toys and filling the closets with clothes. The rest was at the mercy of the meandering international adoption process.

“In this period of their lives, we knew how important these days were for the kids’ developmental cycle,” Craig says. “It was really frustrating for us because we had reading tools for them and reading games and all the things we thought would help them. We played with them with that stuff while we were there, but when we left, that stopped.”

The physical trappings of raising kids were in place. But Kathi was quietly concerned about her and Craig’s parenting style as a couple. They hadn’t discussed a strategy and had shown signs in the past that they had conflicting approaches. Before they were married, Craig was out of town on a business trip and Kathi was staying at his house taking care of the Labs, Buster and Bubba. The house sat on thirty acres and Craig felt the dogs should not be allowed to sleep inside. But when he called to say good night to Kathi, he realized she felt differently. “I heard one of the dogs barking,” Craig recalls, “and I said, ‘I thought you were in bed.’ She said, ‘I am in bed.’ I asked, ‘Well, who’s lying next to you?’ And she answered, ‘That happens to be one of your Labs.’ ”

With dogs, the lenient-versus-strict philosophical battles were amusing. Children were children.

“I never doubted that he would be a great dad,” Kathi says. “It was,
How as a couple will this change our relationship and how will we parent as a couple?
That was more my underlying worry.”

On August 20, 2006, it was game on. The call came that Kathi and Craig had been waiting five months to answer. Passports and visas were issued for the children and it was time to fly to Haiti to pick them up and bring them home for good. Within days, Kathi and Craig landed in the Caribbean and reunited with Amelec, Espie, and Quinn. Their first on-the-clock job as parents was flying with a four-year-old, a five-year-old, and an approximately five-month-old baby to Scottsdale through Fort Lauderdale. Imagine the challenge; a plane ride was as familiar to Amelec and Espie as a ride in a space shuttle for Craig and Kathi.

The brain tends to skip over details when it dreams of “one day,” and that was the case for the Juntunens when they romanticized the final trip home with their children. Now every component of the trip was playing out in real time: the security lines, the cumbersome kid paraphernalia, the language barrier. How do you explain that a seat belt is not a toy when you don’t speak Creole? How do you ask about the scary sounds the plane is making if you don’t speak English? The flight from Haiti and the overnight stay in Fort Lauderdale delivered a smorgasbord of tribulations that most parents experience: vomit, diarrhea, sand in all the wrong places, air traffic delays.

“I remember lying in bed in the hotel room—and I’ve never had this happen in my entire life—I was hyperventilating and I could not breathe,” Kathi says. “It hit me.
What have we gotten ourselves into?
I was petrified.”

By the time the group landed in Phoenix, a forty-minute drive home in the dark remained. A newly hired nanny picked them up; she would stay for a few months to help with the transition. As they drove out of Phoenix on an overpass that showcased the downtown skyline, a galaxy of twinkling lights—but not in the heavens—amazed the kids.

“They looked out on the horizon and saw all these lights from the city,” Craig recalls, “and they had no idea what that meant. They could have been on Mars for all they knew. There was so much sensory stuff and then there was all this doubt. Like,
Okay, is this real and can I trust this?
”

When the sun rose, nothing felt easy or went smoothly. The excited dogs scared the daylights out of the kids. Amelec mistook his closet for the bathroom. The intriguing dimmer switches got a workout. Untangling any snag—like Espie’s not liking her meal—was tricky using hand signals.

“There are tension points in any day where effective communication helps redirect the course, and if you can’t really communicate quickly, course correction becomes more of a challenge,” Craig says. “Also, forget about us. Can you imagine the kids? Everything was new: television, hot and cold running water. They came from a very primitive environment and overnight they were beamed up to this new way of living with all this new stuff. What I learned is how unbelievably resilient kids are; at least ours were. They were intrigued by everything and intimidated by nothing. I’m sure they wanted to know more about how things were working, but they just accepted it all as a new way.”