Chicago Tribune - Adoption route leaves mother, child exiled in Nepal

Mary Schmich, a longtime columnist at the Trib called last night and she wrote this piece, which I believe will be in Sunday's paper. So go and buy the paper if you don't already get it!!

Adoption route leaves mother, child exiled in Nepal

Candice Warltier and her adopted daughter, Antara. (Family photo / September 23, 2010)
• Mary Schmich
•
Chicago woman wants to bring daughter home, but U.S. policy is blocking her path
Mary Schmich
September 26, 2010
One of the few good things Candice Warltier can say about being stuck in Nepal is that she has learned the words in the Nepali language for "I love my daughter very much."
On Friday, she said it while sitting in Katmandu and, through the miracle of Skype, I heard it in Chicago.
It was noon my time, past bedtime in the Himalayas, but Warltier was happy to stay awake if telling her story would help to get her and her daughter home.
"I have this new baby girl who is the light of my life," she said, "but it's like a black cloud hovering."
When Warltier left Chicago on Aug. 5, she didn't anticipate a problem with the adoption she had worked on for a year and a half. But by the time she'd passed through L.A. and Bangkok and touched down in Katmandu on Aug. 7, ready to meet a 1-year-old girl named Antara, U.S. policy had changed.
Suddenly, orphans in the adoption process couldn't be granted a visa to leave the country without further U.S. investigation. She and five other families who were already in Nepal were trapped in the policy switch.
"We were told we could be here for a very long time," she said.
It's been so long that she canceled the insurance on her Chicago car. She thinks about subletting her downtown apartment. She had to figure out how to pay the employees of her PR firm, whose clients include the Girl Scouts.
And, on her own in a foreign country, at the age of 42, she is learning how to raise a child.
Warltier had always thought she'd have children, but the right man never materialized.
"And I always thought adoption was such a beautiful thing," she said.
She liked what she knew about Nepal, its beauty, its history, its people, and it had an even more critical appeal:
"Nepal was open to single women. And now I'm here."
For her first two weeks, she took a taxi every day to the orphanage, 45 minutes on bumpy roads through churning traffic. This was not the Shangri-La of mountain climbers and yoga adventurers. It was poor, chaotic, hot.
"The orphanage was run-down and smelled of urine," she said, "but in general, the caregivers took really good care of these children."
On Aug. 18, she officially adopted Antara, and chose to keep the name, which she was told related to music.
If Warltier had arrived in Katmandu just a little sooner, she'd probably be home by now. But Nepal's adoption system has been plagued by abuse — kidnappings, fake documents — and while she was en route, the U.S. government changed its procedures, hoping to make sure abandoned children really were abandoned.
"I have gone back and forth in my mind and considered the moral dilemma surrounding my adopting Antara," Warltier wrote on her blog. "In my heart I believe Antara was abandoned. The Nepali government has done an investigation on her. She has lived at the orphanage since she was days old. Her nanny and the others said no one has ever visited, inquired or sent her money."
Warltier has no choice, though, but to wait for an investigation by U.S. officials who, she said, tell her and the other families almost nothing.
She lived in a hotel room until she couldn't afford it. Her mother, Betty, retired from her job as a Milwaukee public schools psychologist to come help. After her mother left, she moved into an apartment with a Massachusetts woman in the same predicament.
By Nepali standards, they live well — a washer and dryer, a backup generator for the constant power outages — but bugs roam the rooms and tap water is undrinkable.
While Antara naps, Warltier e-mails or Skypes people she thinks might be able to help her get out. Her mother sent her a book on how to raise a toddler. Antara recently took her first step.
Warltier tries to tell herself it's not all bad, a chance to be with her little girl without the tug of a job, the chance to get to learn about her daughter's culture.
She'll find that easier to believe once they get home.
mschmich@tribune.com