Just like in the movies
BY LORRAINE KEE
Post-Dispatch
10/12/2003

Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, (C) 2003

Like the women in director John Sayles' new movie "Casa de los Babys," three St. Louis area mothers know the ups and downs of adopting children from Latin America.

Nearly a year ago, Emily Hall and her husband, Mike, brought their Guatemala-born daughter Isabel home to St. Charles.

Deanna and David Willett, also of St. Charles, also adopted from Guatemala. Their son, Brian, is now 27 months old. They are awaiting final approval of their application to adopt in Colombia.

And Christine and Tom Wheeland brought their daughter Lucy home to University City in June 2002. Lucy, 2, was born in Guatemala, too. The Wheelands have a son Daniel, 15.

All the couples adopted through St. Louis-based Children's Hope International, an adoption and humanitarian agency. The agency facilitates about 700 adoptions a year from China, Russia, Vietnam, Guatemala, Colombia and India.

We brought the mothers together for an advance screening of "Casa de los Babys" to see how closely the film mirrored their experiences. The film opened in St. Louis on Friday.

The movie is a character study of six women who live in a hotel while waiting for their adoptions to go through. Each expectant mother has her own hang-up. They range from ugly-American Nan (played by actress Marcia Gay Harden) to naively normal Eileen (Susan Lynch), from Great Britain.

Hall, Willett and Wheeland gave the movie a thumbs-up.

They said the movie correctly depicted the anxiety of adopting. There is lots of paperwork, red tape. And the whole process can take a lot of time. Sometimes you get the feeling, they said, that it's out of your hands, that you are at the mercy of others.

"The waiting," Willett, 35, said. "You have to put a lot of faith in a lot of people."

But, generally, their experiences with adopting in Latin America differed from the movie.

For instance, in the film, the miserable Nan has lived in a scrubbed-but-somewhat-rundown hotel for better than two months. Being Nan, she believes it's a plot by foot-dragging Latin American officials to prolong the Americans' stays and bolster the local economy.

That wasn't their experience, they said.

"Everyone was super helpful," Wheeland, 40, said. "I never felt like I was being taken advantage of."

And though the entire adoption process can drag on for months, the St. Louis area women's stays in Latin America were nowhere near as tortuous.

Their stays lasted about a week, not months. (Willett expected a stay of perhaps three or four weeks when the family traveled to Colombia to adopt.) They also had better accommodations, staying at Marriott and Radisson hotels. American restaurants - a Burger King, for instance - were nearby.

The area women said they understood why the process was somewhat prolonged, since officials want to make sure the birth mothers were giving up their children for adoption of their own will. As a precaution, Guatemala requires DNA testing of the mother and child, in case babies are stolen, the local mothers said.

And Hall, Willett and Wheeland noted that all mothers and fathers on their journeys got along much better, they said.

"I thought it was odd that there wasn't at least one husband there," Willett said.

Much in the movie is made of the emotional push-pull that Latin Americans may feel about foreign adoptions. America is seen by caretakers in the babies' orphanage as the land of milk and money. While another character in the movie laments and resents the loss of one of his country's most precious resources.

Hall, Willett and Wheeland talked about these conflicting emotions. They knew it couldn't have been easy for the birth mothers to give up their children. Hall noted that the birth mothers weren't stereotypical teen mothers. They were older, with other children in some cases, who simply didn't have the means to support a child and wanted them to grow up with more. The separations were emotional, as caretakers, who had grown attached to the babies, said goodbye.

Yet, Hall, Willett and Wheeland said they were received well in Guatemala. Hall, 28, said a Guatemala businessman told her, as they were departing for home, "Thank you for what you're doing. Thank you for giving her a better life."

All also expressed respect for their children's country of birth. During their stays, they went on tours to learn about Guatemala. They took lots of pictures and bought native gifts for their adoptive children, so they could share parts of the culture with them as they grew older.

They recalled pleasant people and lush, green countryside.

"It was lovely, beautiful," Wheeland said.

But Guatemala combines great beauty with great poverty, they said. Like the young children in the movie, they observed young people living in desperate conditions. Willett said she'd observed women doing their laundry in mud puddles.

"It's hard to avoid some of it," Wheeland said.

Still, Hall added, "I have so much respect for my daughter's birth country."

In the end, they agreed, it was easily worth it. Hall remembered the day they got Isabel.

"It was very emotional," said Hall, who waited 20 months for her adoption application to go through. "My husband and I were both crying. The foster mother was crying. But it made me forget about all the paperwork and the stress of waiting."