Where We Belong (10 page)

Craig next asked Rick why they adopted from Haiti. The answer was sobering. Rick explained that Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, where hundreds of thousands of orphaned children are starving and living in squalor. He added, “We probably should have adopted more.”

Craig was transfixed and had countless questions for Rick. He learned that the Federicos used an agency that specialized in international adoptions, and they fell in love with a photo of the two sisters on a Web page. They flew to Haiti several weeks later to meet the girls and advance the adoption process. When Craig asked Rick if parenting adopted kids felt any different from raising his boys, Rick said, “Parenting is parenting. I loved it the first time, and the fact of the matter is I am doing a better job of parenting now than I did with the boys. Most of that is because I have more experience this time around.”

The conversation stirred a sense of purpose in Craig that had been waiting, yearning for direction.

“The more he talked with me about Haiti, the more interested I was,” Craig says. “That’s when the train left the station: that day at golf.”

On the drive home, Craig called Kathi and asked her to make dinner reservations; he had something to discuss with her that night. All afternoon, he researched as much as he could about Haiti and an American priest Rick mentioned who had started a nonprofit organization in Haiti in one of the poorest and most dangerous slums in the world. At dinner that night, before their meals even arrived, Craig launched a verbal bomb downfield.

“I’m thinking about taking a trip to Haiti.”

Across the table, Kathi responded as if he’d called the wrong play.

“I started laughing at him. It was kind of like that first-date lunch,” she says, laughing again as she remembers the night. “
Really?
I said to him, ‘Last time I checked, I don’t think there’s a Ritz-Carlton in Haiti.’ That was so far out of Craig’s element.”

But she took a deep breath and let him explain his sudden interest in the western end of Hispaniola.

“I’ve learned over the years,” Kathi explains, “to soft-sell my opinions a little more and to be more flexible. I won’t dig my heels in; I’ll try to ask some questions.”

How would he travel there? Would he need inoculations? Were there safety concerns?

Craig didn’t have details; he talked instead of the country’s chaos and the desperate children in need of families, wandering the streets and struggling to survive. By the end of dinner, Kathi was less skeptical and more interested in the idea of traveling to Haiti with Craig. But not just for him.

“Kath is extremely independent,” Craig says. “There was something there for her, too.”

Something that had always perplexed her.

“From the time I was young, I remember driving up the highway in California and watching migrant workers work in the fields,” Kathi says, “and I would ask my parents, ‘How did they get that life and I got my life?’ The disparity in our world has always resonated in me. So, for me, getting to be involved with kids in Haiti? That would be incredible; I’d love to do that. It was just as much for me as it was for Craig and for us as a couple.”

Over the next few days, Craig researched the country while Kathi looked into flights and hotels. Craig also scheduled an appointment for what he knew was inevitable but was extremely loathsome for his wife: shots.

“I am not a needle person. To this day, I can’t even get Botox,” she says with a laugh, “because the few times I’ve gotten it, I passed out.”

Craig had to carry her out afterward, but Kathi toughed out the onslaught of six shots, protection against everything from typhoid to rabies.

That evening, Craig’s continued fact-finding mission online turned up a shocking and unexpected hurdle. The US embassy in Haiti had issued a high-severity travel warning and urged Americans to leave the country. Reasons for the warning ranged from well-armed gangs operating out of Port-au-Prince to ongoing security concerns, including “frequent kidnappings.” When Craig called Rick for his thoughts, he suggested Craig e-mail the minister working in Haiti. Immediately, Craig took Rick’s advice. The response back from Father Tom was disappointing. He confirmed that the security situation was indeed volatile and that the Juntunens should postpone their trip. Craig asked Kathi to come into his office; he had frustrating news to share, plus an idea to run by her. He told her of the trip-delaying travel warning, and then he dropped back again to throw a long ball.

“What would you say if I said I might want to adopt a couple of kids?”

A needle-weary Kathi did not mince words.

“You hate kids.”

Craig insisted he did not.

Kathi began to cite evidence above and beyond the glaring exhibit A, his vasectomy. He refused to go to Disneyland with her. He threw his own tantrum when kids beside them misbehaved at restaurants. He barely survived Thanksgiving dinner with their nieces and nephews. She said she would love to adopt kids but felt it simply wasn’t a fit for him. Craig politely disengaged. He decided he’d put Kathi through enough for now and that a fun trip was in order. He booked a suite at Kathi’s favorite ski lodge in Deer Valley for the week ahead, in January 2006. Days before they left, Craig found a stack of paperwork on his desk with a note from Kathi. Next to a hand-drawn star on the top sheet she’d written: “This one looks good.”

“It’s typical Kath,” Craig says. “She likes more information. She went and did her own research and then circled back.”

She had researched international adoption organizations and agencies that specialized in placing children from Haiti.

“And it just so happened that one of the organizations I had given him was headquartered right outside Salt Lake City near where we were going skiing,” Kathi says. “We both thought,
What are the odds of that?
”

Craig set up a meeting with the agency, which had overseen the construction six months earlier of an orphanage in a small village outside Port-au-Prince called Lamardelle. Twenty-two orphaned kids were housed there and the owners of the nonprofit had just begun matching approved families with children. Due to the months of travel warnings, they had not been to Haiti in more than a year. The owners told the couple that once travel restrictions were lifted, they would love to visit the orphanage with them. Before saying good-bye, the group stopped in the lobby to look at photos of children living in the orphanage. The Juntunens were captivated. They offered, once they saw the agency’s credentials, to make a donation.

When Craig and Kathi got home, they decided to dabble in the process of potentially adopting children from Haiti. No matter what their decision, sorting through the required home study made sense.

In March 2006, two months after meeting with the Utah agency, Craig made plans to visit the crèche, Enfant de Jesus, with one of the managers they’d met. (In Haiti, a crèche is an orphanage that attempts to find families for its children. An orphanage simply houses children until they age out at sixteen.)

Based on their research before the trip, the Juntunens determined that Haiti still posed enough of a safety risk that Kathi should stay home. She made Craig promise to be extremely careful and not to bring home any kids.

“I remember being scared to go, but I went,” Craig says. “I thought,
What if I get kidnapped? What’s that like? What happens when you get kidnapped?
”

Craig flew from Arizona to Haiti through Miami. As the plane descended into Port-au-Prince, Rick’s description of the Caribbean island as “the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere” dominated Craig’s thoughts.

“You know when you go to the doctor and the doctor says, ‘It’s going to hurt,’ and you don’t know quite what that means from a practical sense, you only know intellectually? Having your feet on the ground in a place like Haiti, you appreciate how good we have it,” Craig says. “You also develop a real respect for how people are making the most from the least. The Haitians are a really beautiful people and very resourceful, and so the poverty doesn’t erode any of their dignity; in fact, if anything, it elevates their dignity in how graceful their spirit is in these very harsh conditions.”

From the time the plane landed, chaos ensued. The airport terminal was beleaguered by equally high degrees of humidity, noise, and incompetence. Craig eventually located his bags, which were loaded with toys, clothes, and candy for the children. He and the agency’s manager would be accompanied to the crèche by two workers from Enfant de Jesus; one would serve as the interpreter, the other their driver. Soaked with sweat, Craig rolled down the window of the gray pickup truck, only to choke on the putrid smell of rotting layers of garbage. The logjammed streets pulsed with a lunatic rhythm—pound the horn, slam the brakes, repeat. Throngs of people were wheeling and dealing alongside the unruly traffic.

“There’s just a real raw and almost organic gathering of life and decay, all smashed together,” Craig describes. “Most of the commerce there is barter and trade. People are selling things everywhere. It’s like one huge flea market in the streets of Port-au-Prince.”

Eventually, the quartet made its way out of town and onto less-traveled roads pocked with potholes. The driver stopped at a small store with an armed security guard to buy a five-gallon jug of water for his passengers. He then turned off on a dirt road comprised of more rocks than dirt. When they finally bumped and banged their way into Lamardelle, Craig’s travel partner suggested a brief walk through town. A narrow path offered a winding tour of makeshift houses with no electricity. A cement trough that ran along the roadside held the precious yet much compromised water supply. The multiple uses were horrifying—drinking, bathing, laundering. Farm animals had full access to the trough as well. Villagers bade the foursome hello in Haitian Creole and watched them wander through their neighborhood. En route back to the vehicle, Craig noticed another parked truck that had somehow dumped its load of pigs. The dirty herd was milling about and several were mating, thrusting other pigs into a jealous rage. Craig was on one side of the mayhem, the gray truck was on the other. He was forced to dart and dodge his way through a squealing, smelly crush of hogs.

“That was the most dangerous part of the whole trip!” Craig says, laughing.

When they arrived at the crèche, a massive metal gate forced them to idle and wait for permission to enter the four-acre compound. Armed guards looked down on the truck from a tower built next to the crèche.

“Inside those walls is sustenance and desperate people really want it,” Craig explains, “whether it’s a bag of rice or a chicken or whatever it may be. The guards are protecting the kids, but mainly the environment.”

As the truck rolled through the gates, Craig saw a stark difference from the barefoot children he’d seen in the primitive village amusing themselves with a stick. The play yard at the crèche was active with clean-clothed children jumping rope and laughing as they kicked balls back and forth. The fourteen-thousand-square-foot building that housed the kids was constructed with cement blocks, a fortress for its innocent occupants. The orderly, happy environment was a welcome relief to Craig, who was still processing his first glimpse of the third world. Craig was introduced to Gina Duncan, a native Haitian who was educated in and also worked in the United States for years. Frequent trips to Haiti compelled her to move back and try to improve the lives of orphaned children. She had married a Haitian man named Lucien, and together they ran the crèche. Craig was impressed by the clean, efficient nature of the facility, complete with a preschool, large kitchen and eating area, laundry room, and sleeping quarters. The twenty-two children in the crèche were tucked in each night by staff they referred to as aunties. Craig decided to ease his way into the crowd of children playing, eager to join in if welcomed. A little girl in a red dress and white shoes walked over to meet him. As they strolled together she reached up and grabbed Craig’s hand. His heart melted; the “kid guy” in him was revealed.

“I think he was always in there. I think as I have grown and evolved, whatever tiny part of being a kid guy just grew and blossomed over time. Seeing those kids there was so—it’s hard to explain, but it was such a convergence of so many things for me,” he says. “It was the contrast to the childhood that I had, and the other thing that really struck me was all the magic in these kids. But how was it going to come out? How were they going to evolve and grow and become who they were supposed to become?”

The little girl’s name was Esperancia, which in Haitian Creole means “hope.” Gina told Craig that Esperancia was four, and that she and Lucien had found her in a mountainside village when she was a malnourished two-year-old. Her mother was a single parent raising seven or eight other children and allowed the Duncans to take Esperancia to their crèche. No family had shown interest in adopting her during the two years she lived there. Craig was amazed, and also floored by a whimsical little kick step Esperancia did as she walked hand-in-hand with Craig. It mirrored one that Craig sometimes did for Kathi as they walked their Labs early in the morning, when sleeping neighbors would not see his ambulatory antics. Was it a sign that Esperancia was meant for them?

Craig continued to play with the children, who were friendly and eager to have Craig teach them how to throw a Frisbee. When the aunties called in the children for dinner, Craig took the opportunity to e-mail Kathi to let her know that he was safe and to share some details about his journey so far.

The first thing that comes to my mind is how disappointed I am that you are not here to share this experience with me . . . but it has been an unbelievable day.

He told her how the crèche and its staff exceeded his expectations and that he’d already connected with a little girl who miraculously did his “cartoon walk.”

I don’t want to jump the gun, and I know we said that I would not identify any kids for us to adopt unless something unique came up . . . but . . . I don’t know if I have seen anything more unique. Can you be thinking what I am thinking . . . I have to wonder if Esperancia is supposed to be our daughter.