Sherry Cluver’s inspirational post yesterday is a poignant reminder of the family bonds HFF strives to keep intact. Here are some of the families we are currently working to keep together:
Today’s post was written by Sherry Cluver, an HFF fundraiser and the mother of two children once in Jamie and Ali’s care. Here, Sherry reflects on the painful journey she, her husband, Chad, and their children took with a family in Haiti whose children the Cluvers had planned to adopt.
“Love Bears All Things:” These words are framed and displayed on a shelf in our family room. Alongside them are two photographs: one of four children (our birth kids, Hunter and Baylor, and the two young ones we believed would become their siblings) and another of our American family standing alongside our prospective adoptive children and their birth parents.
The hollow eyes and drenched cheeks of the disrupted Haitian family now speak clearly to what Chad and I didn’t yet realize.
The paperwork had been properly signed for over a year before we met these children. Yet their birth parents were equivocating on their decision, and on the night of the quake, they retrieved their kids from the orphanage. The grief through which we journeyed pales in comparison to the anguish the parents surely suffered. And our collective pain must be a mere shadow of the hurt in the children.
International adoption is a beautifully challenging choice for adoptive families and for the children who need families, and we’ve been blessed with Anna and Jameson, a different sibling pair—truly in need of an adoptive family—who were airlifted to safety by our friends, Jamie and Ali McMutrie . . .
“Thank you, Jamie and Ali; you have done a miracle for us to get us out of Haiti where it was dangerous (after the quake). I really like the way that you keeping the family in Haiti stay with their kids instead of leaving to goes to orphanage, and I’m sure that makes them really happy. That makes me happy, too. I’ll never forget what you did for us after the quake – it was really brave and nice of you guys. God will bless you guys and keep you safe, because you have done such really nice things that makes a lot of people in Haiti so happy.” –Anna Cluver, 6th grade
I find Anna and Jameson’s progress with spoken English remarkable, considering I am able to utilize only my native tongue of English, and their ability to adapt to American culture and family life impressive. It’s a great deal of work–for them and for us. To leave one’s homeland, comfort zone, heritage, food . . . overwhelming. To work through the loss of a mother or a father or both, a life’s long journey, and parenting children through these battles is not for the faint of heart. It’s rewarding, no doubt, but because it is difficult.
International adoption is not a good first option for children, nor a second, nor third.
I can’t know with certainty what brought the family of our first adoption match to an orphanage those few years ago. I feel confidently that if they were able to change course without any offer of aid that it would not have taken much to have provided a meager hand-up on the front end.
To have substituted empowerment for pain.
I’ve loved my birth children since before they were born, and our adoptive children and I have grown in love with each other, and it is good–we’re becoming whole.
The children who we believed to be “ours,” but were not–I love them still, and my work for putting Haitian families first is the best way I know to give of myself for them.