After an excruciating, nine-day wait, the new Chicago-area parents of five Haitian children raced onto a tarmac in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Thursday night to embrace the adopted additions to their families.
The climatic moment — at the end of a chartered flight that was delayed four hours — came after the parents had spent more than a week searching for a way to evacuate the orphans from Haiti’s chaos.
“It’s amazing, it’s a miracle and I don’t believe in miracles,” said Dr. Elaine Morgan of Skokie, holding 4-year-old Djoude, an HIV-positive girl that she had been trying to adopt for more that two years.
“I am on cloud nine,” Morgan said.
In all, 20 children arrived aboard the 30-passenger, twin-engine plane operated by IBC Airways, which had arranged to use one of its regularly scheduled landings into Port-au-Prince despite the turmoil in Haiti’s capital.
The Chicago group, joined by a number of other adoptive families from around the country, said that they were still a bit stunned that everything had worked out.
“I just can’t believe it,” said Kim Lewen of Willowbrook, thrilled that, after all the traumatic events, one of her two new Haitian-born daughters remembered her face. “(My oldest daughter) knew who I was. She smiled so big.”
In the days after the quake, the Chicago-area families — Lewen, Morgan, a Lincoln Park couple, and a Haitian-American couple — frantically tried to coordinate a rescue after learning that the orphanage housing the children was running out of food, water, and medication.
Their first attempts were thwarted. Some of the children were staying at the orphanage’s hilltop location outside Port-au-Prince. The capital was in shambles. All the necessary paperwork, which had taken months and in some cases years to complete, lay under rubble.
Eventually Chances for Children, an Arizona nonprofit that helps fund the orphanage, chartered the private flight, and got clearance to land, offering to bring in supplies, such as donated blood, water purifiers, food, and baby formula.
Although the State Department has discouraged private planes from flying into Port-au-Prince, the group’s president, Kathi Juntunen, defended the decision as best for the children.
The airline “just happened to know the right people,” Juntunen said.
“These kids are experiencing devastation and tragedy,” she added. “I just cannot imagine grouping them up and sticking them on a cargo plane. It sounds horrible and I don’t think it is right for the parents either.”
At home in the Chicago area, arrangements had been made quickly as the families scrambled to book flights to Florida. Lewen, who originally expected to welcome her two girls this summer, said she had been working nonstop to ready their room, re-arranging furniture and erecting a crib.
Lisa Gregg of Lincoln Park, who with her husband, had just started the adoption process, had been preparing her other children for the arrival of their new brother, Nelson, 3.
“Now life can begin. A real life,” Gregg said Thursday after she and her husband were re-united with Nelson, who they met for the first time last fall.
While relishing the moment, Morgan, a pediatric oncologist at Children’s Memorial Hospital, said that she still recognizes other struggles may lay ahead.
“There has been no time to prepare these children for coming from Haiti to Chicago, which is around 30 degrees right now,” Morgan said. “Ahead of us will be all the challenges of helping them to get over these traumas.”
Sun-Sentinel photographer Carey Wagner contributed to this report. [email protected]
PHOTO: Randy Mitchell of Chicago, center, closes his eyes as he hugs his adopted son, Nelson, after greeting his plane from Haiti. Families gathered at the airport in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to pick up their new family members from Haiti on Thursday. (Sun Sentinel photo by Carey Wagner / January 21, 2010)
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