Where We Belong (12 page)

The shock and awe was more debilitating for Mom and Dad. They had given the nanny the first few days off to make the setting less confusing for the kids.

“I remember one time in the first three or four days,” Kathi says, “Craig and I could barely get breakfast on the table without it being stressful. We looked at each other and said, ‘How do people have jobs and have kids?!’ We couldn’t even get breakfast served.”

They decided right away to ditch the extensive “family fun” activities they had planned on paper . . . before they could truly understand the live version of 2 + 3. A low-key routine now made more sense. The five hung around the house, visited the zoo, and tooled about in golf carts.

But on day ten, it was time for Amelec and Espie to not just dip their toes in the ocean of newness but to dive in headfirst. Because it was late August 2006, school in Arizona was already under way. Before the adoption was official, Craig and Kathi had spoken with specialists, done extensive research, and ultimately decided to enroll the two kids in a private school and see how they fared. Espie would be in pre-K, Amelec in kindergarten. How would they communicate? Would they fit in with the other students? Very quickly, Craig and Kathi knew they had made the right choice.

“It was amazing how they adapted and how much they enjoyed it,” Craig says. “And then it dawned on us that we had taken them out of an environment of being around kids, and that’s all they knew—being part of this army. When we brought them home it was just us and the three of them. What we didn’t appreciate was that not only was the functional living space different, but also the daily dynamic of being around kids.”

The first week of school included some expected rough patches: hot and cold reactions to the school experience and some missteps. Kathi decided that Amelec needed a belt for his school pants. She threaded it through his belt loops and secured the buckle. Amelec loved it and was excited to wear the belt to kindergarten. At lunchtime, the Juntunens’ phone rang.

“We got a call from the principal saying Amelec had an accident,” Kathi says. “We were so shocked because that was not like him. We thought,
Oh my God! Is he reverting back to toddlerhood?
Everything went through our heads. When Craig went to go pick him up and bring him a change of clothes, in his broken little English he said, ‘I knew I had to go to the bathroom but I couldn’t get my belt off.’ ” She laughs. “Every day there were probably three or four of those kind of incidents.”

Ironing out each day’s wrinkles was exhausting; plus, Quinn was not sleeping much. There was also the tug-of-war between Craig and Kathi over time-outs and teaching moments.

“There’s that old saying, ‘There are no bad kids, there are just bad parents,’ ” Craig says. “I really believed we had this enormous opportunity and responsibility to influence all the things that were going to shape our kids’ lives. That became a real source of tension for me and Kath once we became parents.”

Why, then, would the couple add another plate to the full set already spinning above them? They simply could not forget the other children left behind at Enfant de Jesus.

Initially, the Juntunens thought they would simply help fund the crèche, but after months of interacting with the facility, they wanted to get more involved and attempt to advance the quantity and quality of adoptions. Just one month after the kids came home, Craig and Kathi began to research what it would take to create a nonprofit foundation in Haiti called Chances for Children. The goal was to partner with Enfant de Jesus to fund and manage the crèche, and to also improve the surrounding community.

“Not only did we have this very steep learning curve about how to be effective parents with children who don’t speak our language,” Craig says, “now we were getting into the nonprofit center of adoption in a country we had visited a few times but had very little knowledge about how the inner workings of that country operated. That learning curve was also very, very steep. That was mostly Kath. We would put the kids to bed and she would go down to the office and try to figure things out.”

By September 2007, the foundation received its tax-exempt status. Kathi would eventually handle the day-to-day management of the crèche and Craig would focus on fund-raising. Their partners at Enfant de Jesus in Haiti continued heading up operations for the first six months so the couple could get into a routine with the kids.

“It’s sort of a blur. I remember it was difficult,” Kathi says. “Fortunately I’m a really solid sleeper. I need a minimum of six hours; I prefer eight. But when I do sleep, I sleep.”

Over the next year, the children flourished, and the more Amelec and Espie heard and spoke English, the easier communication became. Craig’s golf buddies, shocked by their friend’s domestic transformation, encouraged him to write a book. They felt the amusing stories he’d shared with them about being a newbie parent at fifty-one would result in a good read. Craig considered the idea more of a chance to motivate a prospective parent to adopt.

“My deal was I had to write an hour a day,” Craig says. “A lot of times that hour of the day would be in the middle of the night when I’d get up to go to the bathroom, like all old guys do.”

In April 2009,
Both Ends Burning
was published. The name referred to a phrase his mother used when she felt overwhelmed, as he did in his role as a new dad. All proceeds from sales went to Chances for Children. For Craig, an intriguing result of his book was the reaction from readers who shared their own challenges with the international adoption process. Craig discovered that the Juntunens’ cost and time frame for adopting was minimal compared to the average attempt. Families were spending $28,000 and waiting three to five years to officially adopt. Craig was alarmed and confused. Why would the system discourage the uniting of compassionate people with desperate children? He was also shocked by a steady decline in international adoptions over the past five years. He assumed there was simply insufficient demand in the United States to adopt children living in harsh conditions abroad.

To gather more information, Craig commissioned several studies to examine the process and the involved agencies, like the US State Department and UNICEF. He also founded Both Ends Burning, a nonprofit corporation to promote adoption everywhere and to facilitate improvements in the international adoption process. When more than a year’s worth of research was completed, the data confirmed what readers of his book had already expressed: desire indeed existed at both ends, but multiple factors were obstructing an affordable and timely miracle in the middle.

Espie, Craig, Quinn, Kathi, and Amelec, Scottsdale, 2014
(Courtesy of Cameron & Kelly Studio)

“The problem was not that there weren’t plenty of kids who needed a family, and not that there weren’t plenty of families who wanted to adopt those kids,” Craig says. “The problem was: how do you process the adoptions and get these kids home in a safe and predictable way? The process was so arbitrary. The entire system from a general operational perspective gave me cause for concern.”

• • •

For three years, Craig and Kathi watched their own kids grow and flourish in the safety of their family. It was a heartbreaking reminder that millions of other children around the world—and the families who wanted them—were being denied a similar opportunity.

“Twenty or thirty thousand dollars just to engage in the adoption process?” Craig says. “It’s one of the things we really wanted to look at and change. For us, the meaningful things that we did with our kids were not dependent on or related to any economic condition. What mattered to them was belonging to a family, knowing that they were safe and that somebody loved them.”

Craig found that the whole ball of wax—all the factors that contributed to a flawed international adoption process—was as big as the globe itself. Some of the challenges:

• Child welfare services were basically nonexistent in many countries. Orphaned children simply did not count when it came to government priorities.

• International aid organizations sought to treat specific problems children encountered, like poor nutrition, malaria, and AIDS, but there seemed to be no concerted effort to place orphaned children into families.

• Well-meaning existing treaties instead added more bureaucracy and steps to the international adoption process and did nothing to compel governments to solve the problem of children living outside of parental care.

• Despite countless success stories, the very few cases where adoptions had gone seriously wrong grabbed the headlines. No organized campaign existed to counteract the negative publicity and set the record straight.

• Each country had a unique system for processing international adoption cases, yet they were all basically doing the same things. Standardized procedures could simplify and significantly speed up adoption case processing and lower the cost of adoption.

Craig identified social entrepreneurship as a catalyst for positive change. He felt that over the next decade, the same innovative approaches and can-do attitude that delivered productivity and performance in the private sector could be applied to the current global bureaucratic mess. While Kathi, through Chances for Children, was affecting change day to day on the ground level, Craig knew that Both Ends Burning had to take on the big-picture goal of making people aware of a crisis that was oceans away. They would then, ideally, pressure lawmakers to reform the adoption process.

“The reason political apathy persisted was that very few people knew about this issue,” he explains. “We didn’t have any social force with our leaders. Our government and all democracies have this condition where the leaders don’t do anything proactively. It’s a very reactive system, and what they react to are the squeaky wheels—lobbyists or concerned citizens. So there was no social awareness or concern to make this issue a political priority.”

Craig began contacting people who’d successfully caused cultural sea changes. He spoke with Candy Lightner, who founded Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and Nancy Brinker, the founder of Susan G. Komen for the Cure. Both women told Craig that social revolutions start in living rooms and grow from there. They also told him that they worked tirelessly for seven-plus years—without the benefit of today’s social media—before their causes showed signs of becoming vast movements. Craig was also interested in creative ways to motivate people, so he researched the impact of cause-related documentaries like
The Cove,
about dolphin slayings in Japan, and
Waiting for “Superman,”
about the flawed American public education system. When Nancy suggested that he make a film, Craig decided to executive-produce a feature-length documentary about the plight of children languishing in orphanages overseas.

In August 2010, Craig flew with a film crew to Guatemala, Ethiopia, and Haiti to capture the joys and frustrations of several families attempting to adopt children. The crew also shot footage in Vietnam. Craig says his colleagues were a perfect example of how awareness can trigger action.

“The film crew knew nothing about this issue,” he says, “and the more they learned, their trajectory of being originally curious, and then concerned, and then outraged was similar to mine.”

Craig wanted the film to serve as a tool for change. Here’s where we are; now how do we fix it? The documentary was titled
Stuck
, to describe the plight of millions of orphaned children around the world.

In May 2012, a board member of Both Ends Burning arranged for a screening of
Stuck
at the exclusive Soho House in Los Angeles, where media moguls and celebrities gather to watch independent films and discuss them over dinner.

“In the audience that night were a number of people in the film business,” Craig says, “and one of them was Meyer Gottlieb of Samuel Goldwyn Films. Afterwards, I went up to Meyer and he said, ‘I really admire what you’re doing, but your film has a lot of work to be done.’ ”

Based on Meyer’s input and his own gut instincts, Craig reworked the film. It paid off. By fall 2012,
Stuck
had won several awards at prestigious film festivals.

Craig called Meyer and asked for a second viewing. He agreed and invited Craig to his private screening room.

“There were maybe ten chairs, and his chair was in the back and I was in the front row. We watched the film, and when the lights came back on I turned around, hoping he was still there,” Craig says, laughing. “He said, ‘That’s well done, Craig; it’s a lot better.’ ”

Weeks later, the men talked about how to best showcase
Stuck
. As president of Samuel Goldwyn Films, Meyer agreed to distribute the film and suggested screening it in twenty test markets. Craig felt instead that a town-hall-meeting approach might better ignite a social movement—the living room approach that Candy and Nancy utilized. Craig scrambled to create a bus tour in February 2013 that would stop in sixty cities over seventy-eight days. The side of the bus would be plastered with the slogan “More than a movie. It’s a movement.”