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“Chao” to all our friends through Families with Children from Viet Nam! We are the Daniel family; Carrie, Chloe, and Robin. I, Carrie, am the single-mother of Chloe and Robin who are now 3.5 and 1.5 respectively. In my "spare" time I teach writing at our local community college, I write for a new international adoption magazine called Chosen Child, and I am the editor of Double Happiness, the Colorado Families with Children from China newsletter. Chloe enjoys going to preschool two days a week and "playing" with our two boarders who are from Beijing and are students in the International Economics Program at the University of Colorado, Denver. And Robin is working on teething, talking, and toddlerhood! It is a privilege to be the February Feature Family, and we would like to thank Wendy Barron for her hard work on this web site. It was our great joy to meet the Barron's when we were visiting in Arizona over the holidays.

Now, let me share with you how we became a family of three. I had always seen myself as the mother of two little girls, and when I was thirty-five I experienced an evening that was powerful enough to shake up my entire life. I can’t explain it exactly, whatever it was that charged me that night, the television, or a book I was reading, whatever, but it hit me like lightening. I knew the time had come, the time I was to become a mother, but there was no significant man in my life to help me become one. Having been adopted myself, adoption was always a comfortable and viable option for me. Over the Christmas holidays of 1994, spent with my family in Colorado, I announced to my parents that I was ready to pursue the adoption of an infant. With their blessings, I returned home and proceeded to look around the Seattle area for an agency that facilitated Eastern European adoptions, but door after door after door closed upon that idea. My brothers and I had been adopted, and it didn’t seem like any big deal, so running into these barriers was confounding. One adoption facilitator who was home briefly from Romania discouraged me by saying that the kids on the streets were better behaved than the kids in the orphanages. Most of the calls to advertised or recommende agencies were answered with a blunt “hello”, very unprofessional and none too inviting. One more phone call to an agency advertised in the Yellow Pages brought a promising bit of information. The young woman who admitted that she was only in the office to get it closed down for good after losing their license suggested that I call WACAP. Another young woman answered, “This is the World Association for Children and Parents, Mary Kay Duncan speaking. How may I help you?” I knew I had found what I was looking for. Mary Kay told me about an informational meeting coming up at the end of January, and promised she’d send me the information packets they had available on their international adoption programs. That January 31st, I went to that meeting armed with my decision to apply not to an Eastern European program, but to the China program. I based this decision on the availability of healthy female infants, and on the speed of the program, but mostly on my family’s personal history there. My grandparents served as missionaries in central China during the early 1920’s, my mother and her younger sister were born there, my aunt’s husband is Chinese and their son half-Chinese. I knew with that kind of family background, my child would have a fairly good chance of feeling connected. And so I proceeded.

My dossier left for Beijing on the 1st of May with a promise that the referral could be expected in six weeks. And six weeks later, on June 17, I walked to my mailbox with bated breath, with the anticipation that something might be there, and I opened the door to find a Fed Ex envelope that obviously contained a video tape and that carried the WACAP return address. I was flushed with anxiety. I carried the mail in to the apartment, looked through everything, opened every envelope including the junk mail, leaving the Fed Ex envelope atop the raised counter for last. Finally I opened it, realizing that this was the first time I would look into the face of my daughter. I shook. I cried. My baby was in Yiwu Social Welfare Institute in Zhejiang Province, PRC. She was born on April 9, 1995, which made her two months and eight days old. I popped in the video to see thirty seconds of a very hungry little baby screaming and wiggling for her bottle. She was fierce,and alive, and healthy. And I was so happy, so pleased that she was going to be my daughter. Ni, Xi was going to be MY daughter. I was to leave for China on July 20, and in the meantime there were many prayers answered about her name, about the inevitability of our becoming a little family; that I was right to bring a child into a single-parent household, albeit one with lots of love, financial stability, and opportunity.

During the first year that Chloe was home we made three trips to Denver to visit our family, and I began to think seriously about the importance of having our family nearby for support of me and of attachment for Chloe. I knew by the time Chloe was fourteen months old that we’d be moving to Denver, after nearly twenty years away for me, so that Chloe could know her grandparents and uncles. It was one day months before we moved, however, that I was praying while on my way to work. I’d received answered prayers throughout Chloe’s adoption process, and so I spoke out loud asking that a sign be given to me if I was to be the mother of a second daughter, a sister for Chloe. As I looked to the side of the road, on a lawn still brown with winter, a beautiful robin pecked the sod and my heart leaped into my throat. It was not that the robin was extraordinary in any way, it was that I could not remember the last time I’d seen one, anywhere, at any time, but never in the chill of an early Seattle spring . This moment may not seem stupendous, but it confirmed for me that a little sister was meant for us. Don’t ask why, I didn’t. All I knew was that something amazing had taken place in my heart.

We moved to a suburb of Denver that summer, August, 1996, when Chloe was sixteen months old. Into a huge home with room for three of us, and perhaps some exchange students in the future, we settled down and got on with the process of work, church, and child care, and Families with Children from China. Six months later, on Valentine’s Day 1997, I visited Adoption Alliance, an adoption agency close by with an excellent reputation. I had planned to use them for my homestudy agency and to utilize WACAP once again in my adoption of another girl from China. I began to inquire about the process at that time and learned about the reorganization of the Chinese Center for Adoption Affairs, and the new special-needs rule for families with healthy children who wanted to adopt another child, and the incredibly long process times. I was discouraged, but dedicated to China. And then I thought long and hard about Chloe and her needs, and how good a single parent I could be to her and a sibling with an unknown special need. It wasn’t going to work for me to adopt from China again. I finally figured that out and went on to grieve the loss of a culture and people I had grown to love. That little robin appeared in my thoughts often, and when I began to contemplate other nations with international adoption programs I began to play with names; Guatemala and “Mercedes”, the Marshall Islands and “Correl,” but every time I sought out a new place, and name, the adoption process came to a grinding halt. Then one afternoon I went to visit my friend Chris who has two little girls adopted from China. While our daughters played together, Chris turned to me and asked me point blank, “Why do you just keep bypassing Viet Nam?” I didn’t know why. I supposed it was because of our history with the war. I had experienced some difficult moments as a teenager with a couple of Vietnamese high school boys, brand new “boat people” who stirred in me self-conscious feelings I didn’t understand. But as with everything else in my life, when I am curious I look into it, and into Viet Nam I looked. What I thought about were the many Vietnamese students I had taught at the college level; the lovely young woman Lan whose kindness and dedication made her a memorable student; the young man called David who just could not grasp the English language, who was so very lonely for his homeland and who was desperate for connection and love and affection, but who would only consider the arranged bride who awaited him back in DaNang; and the middle-aged man who, like me, had taught many years of middle-school aged children, but who now pushed a broom to earn just a little while trying to educate himself for a skilled labor job. These students taught me long before I realized it that the Vietnamese were a people whom I could love. And once that comfort came to me, I laid WACAP’s application aside and filled out the one for Adoption Alliance’s Viet Nam adoption program.

My friend Donna, who had applied in January to adopt a little girl in Viet Nam, left for Hanoi in July. The process was quick in the SRV, and I piddled around trying to allow more time between my daughters’ ages. When September of 1997 came, I expected that it would be a similar seven months before I would leave for Viet Nam to adopt my child, allowing at least three years between the two girls, so I went ahead and turned in the dossier I had spent seven months completing. The paperwork left for the International Mission of Hope on September 26th. I figured several months would pass before I’d hear anything, so on October 15th, not quite three weeks later, I was very surprised to receive a message at my office that the International Adoptions coordinator from Adoption Alliance had an urgent message. When I phoned Linda she informed me that a referral had come through from Hanoi. It briefly said, “I am sending papers today for the Daniel family, Nguyen Lan Phuong born on August 1.” My baby had been born in the summer...she had arrived at the orphanage the day my dossier had been received at the IMH office! Thus an additional red thread began to weave itself into the fabric of our life. Okay, so I had my referral, but it would be months before travel. Right? A week later I received another call from AA saying that the referral had arrived and that my baby was, “pretty cute!” After explaining to my college students that my baby’s picture was waiting for me and that I had to get to the office by four o’clock, they sent me on my way with their blessings. I raced to the agency and Linda came out with a picture. I wasn’t sure if she was cute or not, but I could tell that she was healthy, and strong, like her sister. I was scared, and thrilled, and saddened by the obvious state of poverty in which she was living at the orphanage. I just wanted to get there. But then there was Tet. Would I get there before Tet, or would my daughter, to be named Robin in honor of the little bird who had confirmed my prayer, have to wait for me from the middle of October until March? I had been planning a reunion trip to New York City for Chloe, my mother and myself with our travel group in China. It was all set, even to the point of printing out maps from the Internet, when the Thursday before Thanksgiving, again at work, I received the Urgent Message memo, “call Linda at Adoption Alliance”. I did. I shook. Did the baby die? Had I misfiled a paper, what could it be? Cherie Clark of IMH had notified Linda that 90% of Nguyen Lan Phuong’s paperwork was complete and that she wanted me in Hanoi on December 1st, which meant leaving the US on the 29th of November. From September 26 to November 29--two months and three days from submission of dossier to travel. Not bad, actually it was unbelievable!

Nine days after notice, my cousin Felicia and I boarded the plane for Los Angeles, then Seoul, then Bangkok, and finally Hanoi. And fifteen minutes after we checked into the Claudia Hotel, Mrs. Thuy’s brother, plus our interpreter, and the two of us loaded up into the Honda Accord and traveled the half hour to Tu Liem Feeding Center for Orphans and Malnourished Children. We entered the round, white building asking for Nguyen Lan Phuong, but it wasn’t until I showed them the baby’s referral picture that they knew for whom I had come. We stepped into Dr. Vinh’s office and very shortly thereafter they brought her to me. It was like a dream, into the past, a deja vu, when my second child, my new daughter looked into my eyes, and like her sister, smiled at me. It was as though they both had said, “Mom, I’m so happy to see you. Take me home.” Robin was not only “pretty cute,” she was strikingly beautiful. I fell in love, and then I looked on the top of her head. There on the crown of her head was a large, blood-red, raised spot about the size of a half-dollar. I had no previous knowledge of the thing, and it scared me half-to-death. I couldn’t believe it. I’d rejected China because of the special needs requirement, and here I was being asked to take a special needs baby? How would this effect Chloe? What if I couldn’t take this child home? What if she was terminally ill? How could I possibly leave her there? What was I to do? I knew immediately that that baby was not going to remain in Tu Liem. I changed her clothes keeping one embroidered blouse as a keepsake, I choked back tears, I bravely toured the orphanage scared to death, but taking pictures of her lying in her crib for one last moment, noting the toys that she had been near. And I finally got her back to the Claudia and went quietly into my room. I was so afraid. I looked up the disorder in my “What to Expect...” volumn, I asked one of the four pediatric nurses who made up part of the group of families adopting at the time about this thing called an “hemangioma”. Was it growing into her brain? Would it disfigure her? Would it debilitate her? Would she die? I called my father, and he promised to check into it. And he did, and I got the answers I needed from Cherie, and from Ginny the nurse, and from my father, and from the Swedish doctor at the international clinic. I knew that my daughter was going to be okay and that the spot on her head would clear up eventually; perhaps by the time she was four or five.

Robin Daniel

I adopted Robin on December 4, my mother’s birthday. We finished our lovely stay in Hanoi and then Bangkok and arrived home on December 16th. Chloe kissed her baby sister upon their meeting, and Robin smiled at her “sissy”. Today they poke and tickle and tease and love each other as sisters will do. Robin is a lovely toddler learning to speak and demand and gi90ve love to those around her. She has inserted herself into our lives, and she is most welcome here. I am most thankful to our Lord for blessing me with these two beautiful young children. They are my joy, my fulfillment, my whole heart. And by the way, Robin’s hemangioma, at eighteen months of age, has flattened completely, has left no residual effects, and is now nearly clear.

Robin Daniel

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