LEHI -- The last time Brent and Lori Rosenlof saw their daughter, she was playfully hitting her daddy's bald head and singing "Old McDonald Had a Farm" in Creole.
The couple had to leave Jessica and their son, Nathan, in October, after spending a too-short week with them in a hotel in Haiti, where both children are from. They left hoping that the 2-year process of officially becoming the parents of their beloved children would soon be over, and they'd be able to bring them home for good instead of a few short weeks living out of a hotel room in Port-au-Prince.
Today, they have no idea where their children are and no way of finding them.
"I pray that the dogs can smell what they need to smell to find the people they need to find," Lori said Monday. "It's not just our kids that we're worried about. These are our people."
The Rosenlofs, who live in Lehi, are one of a few families in Utah in the same predicament -- news always on, cell phones close by, constantly checking e-mail, to get word of the children they have been waiting so long to bring home. So far, both Nathan and Jessica are unaccounted for after last week's earthquake, as are a number of children who have been chosen by families along the Wasatch Front.
They've had some good news in the days since the earthquake. A man who works with their orphanage got out with a number of children and has them holed up in an undamaged LDS Church building outside Port-au-Prince. The other founder of the orphanage, called Hope for the Little Angels of Haiti, finally made contact, and she has a number of children with her. A local doctor is bringing money to the groups down there so they can get food, water and medical supplies.
That doesn't erase the pain on Lori's face or the tears in her eyes when she thinks about her babies, though. Two-year-old Nathan, whom she calls her tender-hearted pork-n-bean, was calling Lori mama the last time they were there. She's been looking forward to the day he would sleep just down the hall from her since they met him, 19 months ago.
Jessica, who is a "little spitfire, 100 percent feisty Haitian," turns three this month. Not only will they not celebrate with her, but her birth father, who they thought terminated his parental rights, showed up at the orphanage in December and took her. Jessica could be anywhere, and the family that's loved her and planned for her for two years, especially the man who has become her father, is scared.
"Whoever that man is, that's not who Jessica thinks of when she wonders where her father is," Lori said through tears.
The Joint Council on International Children's Services is now working on getting children who have found families out of the country and then finalizing the adoptions once the children are safe, a process that could speed up the Rosenlof's adoption once their children are found. Chareyl Moyes, who works with the organization as the Haiti caucus chair as well as with Wasatch International Adoptions, said about 30 children were issued visas or humanitarian parole on Monday, and she's hopeful that the necessary organization is happening to get more children out. That still, however, does not help all of the affected families.
"We've got to locate the kids, keep them healthy and then try to get them out of the country," she said.
The nine children not accounted for, including Nathan and Jessica, could have been taken by a nanny who worked in the orphanage and are hiding somewhere else, or they could have moved to the orphanage's new location across Port-au-Prince. Moyes said she's on the phone every day with organizations in Haiti asking them to watch for the children, and they have employees out looking as well. She thinks all of them dying in the earthquake and its aftermath is unlikely, which means some, and maybe all, are out there needing help.
"The odds of finding a lot of them, I think, are high," she said. "I don't think they're all gone. Maybe it's hopeful.
No comments:
Post a Comment