The
Whitwells
Between the time we decided to adopt Anguel and the time we received Cyril's referral I joined the Eastern European Adoption Coalition’s A-PARENT-RUSS mailing list (better known as APR). FRUA, adoption.com, and the Fertilethoughts boards were my preferred Internet hang-outs. I read the APR list in Digest form because the volume of emails on it was massive. I hadn't come in contact with many other BBAS clients at that point. One day that changed. I happened to see a post by a waiting mom, Charlene Whitwell. Much to my surprise, she wrote BBAS was her agency.
Doing as all interested and curious parties did, I emailed Charlene Whitwell and
inquired how far along she was in the process. I told her we too were BBAS
clients, waiting on a baby boy. In truth, I wanted to know how
her adoption was going with Denise. She
wrote back and said so far, so good. Like ourselves, she and her husband Allan
were waiting for the referral of an infant boy and
Coupled with waiting for her new baby, Charlene Whitwell was actively helping Denise in a formula drive for some Russian
orphanages. To my knowledge, many
BBAS families donated and some children did, in fact, receive
formula and some food.
By early September, the Whitwells received a referral for a little boy,
about a year old from Izhevsk, capital of the Udmurtia republic just east of
Perm. She was motivated to find out information about Perm and Izhevsk
for us. She was instrumental in receiving information out about some of the
orphanages, and sent us the information.
She corresponded with two families. One who adopted two boys from
Perm and the another who had adopted from Izhevsk. One of the children had been in Cyril’s orphanage.
Charlene sent us a photo of her new baby's referral. He was cute as a button. She and
Allen couldn’t wait to travel for him. Both the Whitwells and the Cases longed for our court dates to get our
boys.
Then a bomb fell on them — and, indirectly, us — in mid-October. I was reading the APR digest and an email hit which stunned me: Charlene wrote that their referral had been adopted by a Russian family.
I wrote back with my deepest sympathies, but sincerely didn’t know what to say.
Suddenly losing a referral is like a death.
Charlene
asked on the list if they should get some money together to plant a tree
in the child’s honor; I posted and said that was a good idea.
Privately, I asked her what had happened. Later, we would both realized the story the Whitwells received from Denise Hubbard was unoriginal.
Denise told them that their file had been on the desk at the Ministry of Education in Moscow. An “interested party” had been walking by this desk, and seeing it opened, noticed that the child was available for adoption.
Seeing as this interested party was a Russian citizen and the Whitwells were not,
this person petitioned to adopt the boy. Given
at the time Russians have a pitiful track record in adopting their own
orphans, this was indeed a load of b.s. Charlene told me her husband was really fed up with BBAS
about it. I can’t
say that I didn’t blame him.
Yet, happily, within two weeks they received another referral for a one-year old boy from the same orphanage in Izhevsk. Charlene was thrilled to send me the baby’s photo — a real chubby faced cutie held in the arms of his white-clad medsyostr (Russian for “nurse”) at the orphanage.
They hoped to
travel for the baby around the same time we did for Cyril. We maintained email contact, even throughout the hell of
paperwork madness that was to follow for us both while we waited.
Then, another BBAS client popped up on APR — or should I say, former client. One day, in October while reading the digest I recognized a familiar name and email address ... Christy and John Romano, the couple from Long Island.
I asked Denise about them in August to see if they had gotten a referral. An oddly evasive and strained “No” was her response.
I figured out why Denise's answer had been so strained. The Romanos were proclaiming they were traveling for twins whom they had seen advertised on a photolisting from Dove Adoptions International out of Portland, Oregon.
After reading that, I emailed Christy and asked what was up. Months before she had gushed Denise Hubbard was wonderful and how great BBAS was and how Denise was going to get them into her new Moscow Program.
Something must have
happened between then and now. The response she sent had the tone of “don’t ask us, this is all
we can say” — “We think BBAS is a good agency, but we felt that Dove had
our children.”
This is the story
of their journey to adopt their daughters.
Note the passing reference to BBAS as “a great agency in Ohio …and
helped us a great deal with all of the paperwork” — which was one of BBAS’s
strengths.
The writing was on the wall, but I wasn’t reading it with either the Whitwells or the Romanos. We were all still in the State of Denial in the Union of Organized La La Land.
Skip to the next chapter in the Whitwells’ story