Antigua and back home

(The comma is back, and so are we!)

Antigua is a much friendlier place for American tourists than Guatemala City. When we got there, Jacobo drove us around the town (didn't take too long; it's only about 100 square blocks) and to our hotel, the Posada Lazos Fuertes. If you recall our previous post about organizations to which we contribute, you'll recall Safe Passage, the organization that helps kids who otherwise would be foraging through the Guatemala City dump. They own the hotel we stayed at. Most of the other occupants were Safe Passage volunteers, including a church youth group from Maine we met. Makes for a noisy hotel, but quite pretty. The town is quite attractive, too. We spent the next two and a half days roaming around the streets, looking at jade in shops, and playing with Gus in the Parque Central. Good food and a lot of fun. The worst part of the weekend was trying to get Gus to bed for naps.

Monday at noon Jacobo came back to pick us up for the drive back to Guatemala City. At this point we were still planning to fly home the next day. Oscar was going to pick up Gus's visa at the embassy for us and deliver it to our hotel at 4. He did so, but soon after he left Rebekah's sharp eyes noticed that the visa had Gus's name spelled wrong (Guastavo instead of Gustavo). We called Oscar immediately, and he met me at the embassy again a few minutes later. By now the place was closed for the night but Oscar managed to talk our way back in. Inside they informed us that there was no way we could get a revised visa on Gus's passport before our 6:30 flight the next morning. Still don't understand why not; clearly all they had to do was change a field on a record in some database and reprint the form, but that's bureaucracy for you. Chagrined, I walked back to the hotel and informed Reb that we had to change our flights and stay an extra day. We did so, and prepared for another 24 hours of confinement (remember, we couldn't leave the hotel with Gus in Guatemala City).

Tuesday turned out to be not so bad. We ate at the hotel restaurant; we played around with Gus; we packed, and we had internet access again, so we called people via Skype. The embassy had our corrected visa ready by 9:00 am. Nothing else to report there. One thing I will say about our hotels: you don't drink tap water in Guatemala or risk gastrointestinal unpleasantness, so you have to rely on the agua pura, or bottled water. The Lazos Fuertes in Antigua recognized this and had unlimited free water available in those water coolers you see in offices. At the San Carlos, you had to pay for it: Q10 per pint. Not expensive, I know, but it's definitely a point against them in my book.

Wednesday we flew home. We had a long layover in Houston, so after we spent an hour in the Homeland Security back office dealing with immigration, we got to introduce Gus to my family. That was a high point, but just about the only high point. The second leg of our flight was delayed two hours, the first hour due to weather in Boston, and the second due to electrical issues with our plane. It was really rough sitting there, Gus crying and hungry in his car seat and us unable to do anything about it because we needed to save his bottle for takeoff so that he wouldn't have ear troubles. Once we did take off, though, he slept through the entire 4 hours.

And so we're home. Hotel life definitely isn't the best way to start a parent-child relationship, but I think we made the best of it. We can get him on a proper schedule now, and we can start to wean him off the sugar-laden Guatemalan formula and cereal he's been eating (seriously, the stuff smells like hot chocolate mix). It's good to be back.

And then they disappeared for a week

(Note to the reader: the comma key is still out of commission on this computer so continued apologies to any Lynne Truss fans out there.)

It turns out that once you have children you no longer have much free time left for blogging. Go figure. We're back in Guatemala City now and planning to come home tomorrow morning. The original plan was to come back today of course but more on that later.

Thursday morning Reb and I went to a couple of nearby museums (musea?) the first featuring old Mayan pots and whatnot and the second featuring new Mayan fabrics and textiles. Pictures are available on the internets. After that we walked back to the hotel and was surprised to find Gus and his foster parents there waiting for us. We were supposed to meet at 1 and it was 12:30 but they'd had a long drive out from Quetzeltenango (also known as Xela for some reason). It was rather awkward. Gus was asleep and the foster parents didn't speak any English so we recruited a nice hotel employee to translate for us for half an hour before Oscar our Bethany rep arrived. We discussed things like schedules and how long a drive it was from
Xela to Guatemala City. Oscar is all business. No small talk for that man. He showed up and said "Hello how are you let's talk about the baby's schedule." Around then we decided it would be a bad idea to let Gus sleep through the hand-off so we woke him up and passed him around. Naturally he was pretty wary of us. Finally Oscar and the foster parents left and that was when Gus started sobbing uncontrollably. He didn't stop for 4 hours except for a short interval when he cried himself to sleep. Finally though that evening he seemed to have worked through the initial grieving process and actually smiled at us before he went to bed.

Friday morning Gus woke up all smiles. We fed him cereal and gave him a bottle and took off for the embassy which happens to be next door to the hotel. We were feeling pretty smug about the amount of time it took to be out the door. Our alarm woke us up at 6 and we met Oscar at 7:05 dressed showered and fed. You're not allowed to take pictures of the embassy so I can't post one but imagine any government building built between 1960 and 1975 and you're pretty close. The waiting room resembled the DMV. They batch all the adoptions together at the same time so there were about 25 Guatemalan babies and American parents hanging out in there. Pretty crowded. We were in there about 2 hours. They asked us questions about making sure we fulfilled the requirements for adoption in our state (or commonwealth in our case) and had us swear an oath that we would re-adopt Gus when we got home. The whole thing took about two hours after which they told us his visa would be ready Monday at 3:30. Oscar told us that he would pick up the visa for us and deliver it to us at the hotel.

That was the last official business we had to do till then so we had arranged to spend the weekend in Antigua Guatemala. Guatemala City is smelly. There are a lot of old cars with diesel engines floating around including the GC public transportation system which consists of these red "chicken buses" which drive up and down the avenidas. They're crazy. Usually packed full of commuters and a couple guys hanging out the open doors as if it's a garbage truck. Also due to cultural misunderstandings about Americans adopting Guatemalan babies (ask us about them sometime) it would have been unwise to leave the hotel with Gus unaccompanied. It's different in Antigua. I was personally surprised at the sheer number of Americans there were there. Many American foster parents and young fresh out of college kids either volunteering or learning Spanish. Jacobo (our driver who picked us up at the airport) drove us over there that afternoon. Gorgeous drive through the mountains. I'll save the weekend in Antigua for another post.

Innocents Abroad

Please forgive my punctuation in this post; we borrowed a lightweight laptop to bring down with us and the comma key doesn't work. It is 19:30 local time here in Guatemala City. Guatemala runs on Central Time but they don't honor Daylight Savings Time. So Guatemala runs on the same time as most of Indiana.

After two rather long flights we arrived this morning at the GC airport. Customs and immigration were a breeze; they barely glanced at the forms. After passing through customs we encountered a large mob of Guatemalans congregating outside the exit all of whom either appeared to be waiting for someone or offering us a ride. We quickly found the gentleman we'd actually arranged a ride from. His name is Jacobo and he served as our tour guide for the next two hours. He showed us quite a bit of Guatemala City and not just the nice parts either. Most of the tour was driving but at one point he parked the car and gave us a look-see at the Catedral Metropolitana (we learned something new: a church cannot be called a cathedral unless it has a special chair for the bishop) and the National Palace. I've posted pictures I took during the tour on our Flickr page. Reb was falling asleep at this point so we had Jacobo drive us to our hotel where we checked in and took a nap.

After waking up I turned on the computer to see what kinds of wireless internet options were available. Turns out the wireless works just fine here although Google and Blogger noticed the change of locale and helpfully translated all its web pages into Spanish for me. I'm quickly coming to terms with the vast amount of Spanish that I don't know. Thank God for Rebekah.

At this point we were getting hungry; we'd just had a couple granola bars for lunch. We went to the concierge desk and changed about $200US into quetzales and asked for a restaurant recommendation. He pointed us to an authentic Guatemalan restaurant called Kacao. We walked over there and discovered that the place didn't open until 6 so we wandered around for half an hour until then. We discovered a book store and passed most of the time in there. All kinds of stuff in there including Nathanial Hawthorne's classic La Letra Roja and Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope sadly not translated into Spanish. We bought a couple board books for Gus.

Finally we went back to Kacao. It was excellent. I get the impression it's a bit of a tourist trap; all the wait staff were wearing traditional Mayan outfits and the restaurant had a domed thatched roof (think Disney World's Polynesian resort and you'll get the idea). The food was great. We had tamales as an appetizer and then we ordered two different Guatemalan dishes both of which arrived in the form of a soup. We stuffed ourselves. Of the five couples in the restaurant with us I think three were adoptive parents or about to become adoptive parents. However the waiters didn't use English with us at all. Reb did great. I was able to contribute a "una cerveza por favor" and several graciases but that was about it.

That wraps up our day. Bed time. Tomorrow we meet our son!

What about the others?

Of course we're completely pumped that Gus will be arriving home soon, but our excitement over his arrival doesn't remove the elephant in the room: what about the other children? Not long after we chose to build our family through adoption, we started to ask this question. We are thrilled to be the family for our children, even though it's not fair that they should need a second family. But what about the children who lose their first family and don't have a second family either? We can't adopt every child who needs a home.
We aren't the first people to ask this question, of course. Half the Sky, a non-profit foundation which provides love, education, and foster families for an increasing number of children who are without homes in China was founded by a family asking this question about the children who they had seen in their daughter's orphanage. Since its founding in 1998 and the opening of its first pilot program in 2000, Half the Sky has expanded to serve thousands of children in its 30 centers in China.
We are proud to support Half the Sky--but the question "What about the others?" is really two questions. The first is, "What happens to the children who have lost their first families?" This issue is what Half the Sky addresses. Although we value Half the Sky's work in loving and educating children in orphanages, its work does not answer the second question, "Why do so many children lose their first families to begin with?" In this case, there's very little that we as Americans can do about that problem, because it is rooted in governmental action and social norms.
However, we can do something about that problem in Guatemala. Most of the relinquishments in Guatemala are rooted in poverty and lack of education. We cannot change that Gus needs a second family right now, but if we could help the families before they have children whose care they cannot sustain, then we could help reduce the number of children in Gus's situation who need a second family. And by solving the second problem, we would also solve the first.
With this goal in mind, we recently evaluated a number of charitable organizations that work in Guatemala and around the world. There are many worthy organizations that work with children who are growing up in orphanages or on the streets of Guatemala, but we wanted to focus our efforts mainly on prevention. We found three organizations which we are now proud to support. We wanted to bring them to your attention so that you could learn what efforts are being put forth to help keep children in their first families in Guatemala, and to assist in those efforts if you choose. We feel that as adoptive parents we bear a special responsibility to the children who are missing their first families and who, for some reason, are not in Gus's place to come home to ours (or to other loving families). And we hope that with our help, Gus will be one of the last children in Guatemala to need a second home.

Safe Passage works with the families whose livelihoods depend on the Guatemala City dump. These families, who were profiled in the Oscar-nominated short documentary "Recycled Life," are mainly indigenous Mayans who were forced from their land during the civil war. The parents daily dig through the trash, but children were banned after a methane explosion in 2005. Safe Passage works with those children and their families to give them a way out of poverty, so that the next generation will not look forward to a "career" of digging through the dump. In Guatemala, school is free but the uniforms and materials required to attend it are not. Safe Passage provides uniforms, after-school tutoring, music and sports, nutrition, and medicine for the children. They also offer literacy tutoring for the parents.

Freedom from Hunger is a microloan organization (this concept has become much better known since Mohammad Yunus won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in microloans, but it's not a new idea. FFH was founded in 1946). It provides small loans and business advice to people (usually women) to start small businesses. Along with the business assistance they provide education on health and nutrition, which along with the extra income significantly improves the health and outlook of the family. Repayment of the loans allows new loans to be made and more families to better care for themselves.

Agros International is the most innovative charity we've seen yet. It focuses on an entire rural community, first helping them secure a loan as a group for land for their community. The land is key, because in Guatemala and other places, the indigenous people were forcibly removed from their land and communities. Their way of life was destroyed and they were given "career options" like digging through the Guatemala City garbage dump. Agros begins with a community looking to work together to start over. It finds land for that community, then helps them succeed with community education, infrastructure assistance, and microloans. As the community flourishes they are able to repay the loans, which are then used to secure a land loan for another community.

We feel that it is a great gift to be able to help Gus's people--it is a privilege, like the privilege of being his parents. Of course we would be delighted to discuss any of these organizations further in person, and we hope that as some of you are looking for gifts for Gus that you would also or instead consider a gift to his people in his honor.

This is how I roll

Two new acquisitions of note to report. Reb has recently learned to knit, and of course the first project she decided to take on was a wool diaper cover for the young'un. He'll be stylin'. It turned out really well, I must say. Note the drawstring waistband.


The other recent acquisition was a gift from some new friends who have two Guatemalan children themselves. I don't really know what it's called, but I fully expect him to have a blast bouncing around in it, waking the neighbors downstairs.

Recommended Reading

I read a fabulous book, the first I've read which is specifically tailored for the friends and family of an adopting family--that would be YOU! It gives dos and don'ts for grownups and tips on how to explain to your kids what has happened in the life of our kid. It's called "Cross-Cultural Adoption: How to Answer Questions" and is by Amy Coughlin and Caryn Abramowitz. Got it here via interlibrary loan, no problem--it's a quick and very helpful read. Please do!

Please Don't Meet the Robinsons

Some of our readers have seen my extensive collection of animated movies, which I hope to like enough that Gus's insistence on the 30th consecutive viewing of a particular film won't make me ill, but perhaps no movie can hold up to that standard. One that certainly doesn't is the newest Disney production, "Meet the Robinsons." This movie is adoption-themed and so caught my attention, but it's not good attention. Early reviews make me think that the movie is poorly researched and that the major theme is actually insulting to adoptees. I'll read more reviews and write more on this later (it's a busy day), but for now, I ask that you please exercise pro-adoption activism by not supporting such a fiasco with your hard-earned money.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sorry to make you wait the weekend for the rest of this discussion--Easter weekend is so busy, and yes it was WONDERFUL. Quick synopsis of the movie: hero was dropped off on an orphanage's steps as a baby. He is a child genius, and is rejected by 124 potential adoptive couples (he keeps a tally), finally deciding that he wants to search for his birthmother since she's the only person who may ever have really wanted him. Then a child from the future snatches him from a science fair to rescue the future. While doing so he sees his future, and it's a good one. He decides that to have that future he must "keep moving forward", and abandons the search for his birthmother (although in the time machine brought by future-kid he has the chance to see her and find out who she is, to be able to search for her in his own time) in order to have the new future with a science-geek adoptive family.

Here's why I dislike this movie, from least to most exasperating.

First, the portrayal of the hero's birthmother is incredibly limited. It is unbelievably rare in this country today for a child to be just "dropped off" anywhere. The birthmothers I have met through Bethany care deeply for their children and maintain open adoptive relationships. Although I understand using this situation as a narrative device and I was glad that the birthmother was portrayed in a relatively positive manner, it is still distressing to see a situation so far from normal presented to children as the adoption scenario.

Second, the interactions of potential adoptive parents in the early stages of the movie are overwhelmingly negative. The hero of the story is visited by 124 potential adoptive families, all of whom reject him in person for trivial reasons. The hero is adopted at the end; but as a potential adoptive parent, I found it demeaning that only 0.8% of adoptive parents mentioned in this movie were portrayed as reasonable human beings, especially when many adoptive parents seek to adopt children with known special physical needs.

Third, I was absolutely horrified to see the theme of the film, “Keep moving forward”, applied to adoption. Adoptees have been told for generations to “keep moving forward,” to forget their past, and to “move on” with their new families, as the hero does at the end of the story. Such advice has brought great grief and trauma to many adoptees, who have found en masse that the loss of their birth families is a hole that their adoptive families simply cannot fill. Children are better adjusted in adoptive families that empathize with the grief of their children about the loss of their birth families. Past experience and current research has led to the welcome practice of open adoption, in which adoptees maintain contact with both their birth and adoptive families. Applying the theme of “keep moving forward” to adoption insults the real-life experiences of adoptees, which tells us that their emotional health requires addressing the past: precisely the opposite.

I'm pretty upset about this mischaracterization of adoption and adoptees especially; I'll be sending a letter to our agency and to Disney. If you can think of any other way for me to advocate for real education about adoption regarding this movie, please let me know.

A Fightin' Owls Car Seat

We inherited a car seat from one of Reb's co-workers whose daughter just outgrew it. Unfortunately, the denim seat cover was in pretty sorry shape, which was understandable given the harsh treatment they undergo. It was grimy and faded with two years worth of sun exposure and crushed Cheerios. However, the seat itself is perfectly sound and only took a bit of cleaning to restore to mint condition.

What to do? As in so many cases, eBay came to the rescue; specifically, the eBay store run by a seamstress called wantful things. She did a simply amazing job sewing a custom car seat cover for us for a ridiculously low price. She works like this: we buy the sewing job using eBay; then we purchase two yards of the fabric of our choice, or one yard each of two fabrics of our choice, and send it to her. As you can see from the picture, we decided to go with our college colors. Then she makes a padded seat cover out of it. It fit over our car seat perfectly, and we were so impressed that we felt that she deserved a plug beyond the usual eBay feedback system. If you're in the market for a seat cover, look no further.

Domestic Adoption Reform

We interrupt your waiting for news about Guatemalan adoption reform to draw your attention to domestic adoption reform here in the U.S. The blogosphere has been buzzing this week, and an adoptee rights bill is in the Massachusetts State Senate.

Some of you asked us why we didn't choose to adopt domestically. There were many reasons behind that decision, but in this context I want to discuss a couple of them. We felt uncomfortable that the domestic adoption process in this country 1) allows first mothers to finalize the relinquishment way too early (some states require only a 24 hour waiting period, by which time the drugs haven't worn off, the hormones are nowhere near evening out, and she hasn't really had a chance to try to parent this child; in Guatemala the first mother is required to sign off 3 times over a period of months), and 2) first mothers choose the adoptive parents BEFORE the birth of the child. This second point sounds very cute and fuzzy and sweet, but although I support the first mother's decision to choose the adoptive family I do not think they should be choosing before birth. I have heard the stories of multiple first mothers for whom their love and respect for the adoptive parents pushed them to place rather than to parent. When they wavered, they couldn't bear to disappoint the wonderful people who were hoping so much for their baby--and the child left a home that could have raised it, and the adoptive family was filled with a child that didn't need their home.

What would a better system look like? A good example is Australia's, in which the emphasis is upon parenting before placing, and a lot fewer babies end up needing new homes. Here's an excellent post by paragraphein about how the specifics of a revamped U.S. domestic adoption system could work. I'm all for it.

Since the entrance of Gus into all of our lives, I've become much more activist about the rights of all people involved in adoption, especially the adoptees. Adoptees are so very vulnerable; they aren't consulted about the family they want to be part of, and they often lack advocates until they have been adopted. I'd like to encourage you to help advocate for the well-being of these children and the adults they grow into: another great post by paragraphein gives some suggestions for becoming an advocate with varying degrees of time to give and further details on the problems with the current system, an excellent blog by seriously details her experience fighting for a truly ethical domestic adoption (including a blessedly failed placement), and this site discusses legislation which may be pending in your area.

The adoption process in our own country scared us. How sad. Let's help make our process an example to the world in how it prioritizes the best interests of the children, protects the birth parents, and supports the adoptive parents.

An Exciting Day

Today we got a very exciting email from our social worker. It said that not only are we out of Family Court, we were submitted to the Attorney General's office (PGN) on January 17, and have already been kicked out! Kick-outs are part of the routine from the PGN; most families have two or three kick-outs. Ours was because the pre-approval hadn't come from the US Embassy yet (it should soon, since the DNA has been completed), and because the last name on the baby's birth certificate doesn't exactly match the last name on the mother's birth certificate (it's a difference of a tilde). So we're waiting for pre-approval, and the attorneys are working on a resolution of the tilde issue. Yes, we think it's funny too.

What's most exciting is that we've already been in PGN for a month, and had our first kick-out without even knowing it. The Guatemalan political situation is, as always, a little weird and unpredictable, but we may be looking at around 3 months until baby instead of around 6. Of course, no guarantees. But I'm starting to get excited on the inside, and my sister (who has two munchkins) is helping me figure out what non-furniture baby things we need.

We also got a medical update (but no pictures). He's doing great!

And lastly, since the Family Court process has been completed, we're feeling reasonably sure that this baby is our baby. Although we're keeping his full name a secret for a while longer, he doesn't need to be Ronald in public anymore. Now y'all can call him the nickname we've been calling him, privately and hopefully, within 24 hours of his referral: his name is Gus.

Crib installed

The baby's room is now fully furnished. Last weekend we acquired and installed a crib in the baby's room. We got it from a co-worker of Rebekah's whose daughter just outgrew it. We also finished and moved in the toy bin (trying and not succeeding to use up the extra paint left over from painting the dresser--we're used to painting rooms, so we way overestimated how much paint we would need). After all the furniture was moved in, we promptly rearranged every piece, but we think we're happy with the arrangement now.

Note the crib's feet. The crib didn't start with any shoes of its own, but these shoes have been waiting for it for years, a gift from friends when we first started telling people that we were going to adopt.

Baby room update 2

In the end, we decided not to stain the dresser after all. Instead, we painted it, as you can see to the right. It turned out pretty well. The semi-gloss paint makes the knobs really pop.

Also, as you can see, we received and installed the foam tiles to cover the floor. Hopefully fewer tears will be shed when he starts to learn to walk.