Gina Duncan says she has always dreamt of the day when her orphanage, Creche L’Enfant Jesus, located 45 minutes east of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, can begin to find homes for the proliferation of HIV-positive children in her beleaguered homeland. For many political and perceptual reasons, in the past four years she has only placed orphaned children who possessed antibodies in their systems. Reluctantly and with a heavy heart she has had to send the other HIV-positive infants and toddlers back with their guardians to their villages to die.
But those unintentionally draconian measures are set to change, thanks to Duncan’s longtime humanitarian effort, which has led to a collaboration with Margaret Fleming, the founder of Adoption-Link, a full-service agency located in Oak Park since 1992.
In 2003, Fleming, a pro-active visionary, created Chances by Choice, an HIV-positive adoption program that provides support for internationally born HIV-exposed children and those families who wish to adopt them.
In 2006 she merged Chances by Choice with Adoption-Link, and became just the second agency in the U.S. to be licensed to place healthy children from Kenya. And on top of all that, they started an Ethiopian Children’s Project-but that is temporarily on hold, as the Ethiopian government has recently pulled all U.S. applications for non-government organization (NGO) status until they can rework their current adoption laws.
The HIV initiative originated with a family event in the 1980s when Fleming learned her brother was HIV-positive and survived. Her altruistic impulse evolved when Fleming took a trip to an orphanage in Vietnam to pick up her adoptive daughter Lien, who is now 7 years old. What she witnessed there was grim. Numerous babies were physically cared for but emotionally ignored. The children were rocking themselves for self-stimulation and wearing white T-shirts branded with the letters “HIV.”
The experience turned her into a relentless adoption advocate. In addition to her three healthy biological adult offspring, the 71-year-old single mom is raising nine adopted kids, age 3 to 26. Her youngest children-Luca, 3, Lanh, 4, and Bekele Mandela, 4, are healthy, precocious and HIV-positive.
And she’s trying to convince other adoptive parents to see the benefits.
Help for Haiti
“I am very excited about being a part of the Chances by Choice program,” said Duncan, executive director of L’Enfant Jesus, during her recent fact-finding visit here. Her family’s orphanage currently cares for about 70 healthy children who are mostly under the age of two. She has been working with Adoption-Link since last year, and is currently completing the adoption of healthy twin girls for a family in Oak Park. Once everything is in place in Haiti, she hopes that by May of this year, Creche L’Enfant Jesus will be the next HIV-positive project under the auspices of Adoption-Link’s Chances by Choice program.
According to UNICEF, in 2005, Haiti had the highest HIV/AIDS infection rates in the entire Latin American and Caribbean region with approximately 13,000 children born there every year infected with HIV. Yet, even though these babies test positive at birth for HIV, many of them will not actually contract AIDS, says Sharon Steckler, a licensed clinical social worker and director of international programs for Adoption-Link.
In the last two years Fleming says Chances by Choice has facilitated the placement of 41 international HIV-positive orphans, mostly with health care professionals, social workers, teachers and people in ministerial fields. They have worked with other placement agencies, who helped them recruit the families interested in adopting an HIV-positive child and providing the families with education regarding HIV, what is involved in adopting a special needs child, and how to establish support systems. Adoption-Link has also worked with them to ease the immigration process, which is getting easier, Steckler notes.
“We would like gay and lesbian couples to become a bigger part of this puzzle,” she said. “They have been fabulous parents for Adoption-Link kids because they tend to be more accepting of differences. However, there is no country right now that will work with gay and lesbian families, including Haiti. South Africa actually doesn’t have a law against it, but they are closed to the United States, and Brazil supposedly doesn’t have a law against it, but we had a gay couple try and adopt an HIV-positive child from Brazil and after a couple of years, they gave up because it seemed like their paperwork was being stalled, and there were excuses.”
In recent years, she says, many countries, including China and Russia, have made international adoptions more difficult. That is why Haiti, which is currently more accessible, is a good option for prospective parents. But international adoptions are expensive (roughly $24,000 to adopt a healthy child in Haiti), and that can be an obstacle, especially for people who already have larger families and choose to adopt a child from another country.
Meeting resistance, dispelling myths
Early on, Fleming says, most people thought she was nuts to think she could place HIV-positive children in homes. But the Chances by Choice program is working, and a few other adoption agencies in the U.S. are slowly taking up the cause. Often, she says, the stigma and lack of education produce the stiffest resistance. What many adoptive families worry about most is the possibility of infecting their other children. They also harbor deep reservations about parenting a child they believe will die. Fleming is determined to dispel those myths, having personally experienced what it’s like to raise HIV-positive children, by talking freely about it.
Every morning her house is abuzz with children going about the business of being a family. The little ones are part of the mix, laughing and playing and when summoned, lining up for their HIV meds-a regular reminder to everyone involved that they face challenges.
“I always say, ‘Medication time,’ and the three of them line up. I say, ‘Who wants to go first?'” Fleming smiles. “They are excellent about taking some pretty foul-tasting medicines. We have some pills that we crush up and put in chocolate pudding and call it their ‘magic dust,’ which they think is pretty cool. So my kids are brave.”
For the most part, Fleming’s preschoolers are healthy children who can get fevers and ear aches unrelated to their condition, that give her a scare and then go away. Everyone in her household understands that HIV is a fragile virus that can’t be transmitted by using the same cup, coughing in another person’s face, or having a child throw up or poop on you. Bleeding, however, is always a concern.
“Parents of HIV-positive children need to always have gloves accessible for times when there is a cut or a nose bleed, but even then there is a 1 in 300 chance of transmission, which is pretty low,” she advises. “Actually, only 25 percent of these children who initially test positive for the virus go on to develop AIDS.
“The truth is that no one knows how long an HIV-positive child will live, but every day there are new advances and a whole new line of drugs,” says Fleming. “I have great hopes that all the children we place will be loved and nurtured and grow up to live good healthy lives because some day they will find a cure.”