Pam's Story (the actual, proper romantic story)

Adoption is not an easy process. I know of couples in the last 5 years that have moved interstate because one state's adoption laws prohibited them from adopting at their age. Deborah-Lee Furness and Hugh Jackman moved to America so they could adopt.

And then there are women like Angelina Jolie and Madonna, who make it look so easy to adopt, like you just 'make it happen' but they wouldn't be able to do that if it wasn't for those parents that have paved the way before her. People like my Mum and Dad who waded through red tape and redneck-like suspicion of the unknown.

I asked Mum to share her side of the story which she graciously wrote down for me. I will now cut and paste, graciously:

"The whole idea came from Michael. When we were in our late teens and just about to be married, he sprung it on me that it had always been a dream of his to adopt a child from a country with a lot of poverty.

We got married and had our three children with that thought in mind. He broached the subject again after Melanie was born in 1971 and so we approached child welfare in Hobart where we were told we may have a chance to be allocated a child from Vietnam. And so we waded through our first round of red tape (paper work, health checks, references and more paperwork). This part of the procedure took 4 months. After another 6 months and extensive interviews, we were finally approved for a child from Vietnam and our approved papers sent to the Vietnamese government. We went about living our lives as normal, as now all we could do was play the waiting game.

The war in Vietnam escalated and while many babies were airlifted out, our names were still not high enough on the list for consideration. In early 1976 the North Vietnamese government had taken control and stopped more any children from leaving the country.

And so we went back to our welfare officer for advice and luckily found a delightful woman who suggested we change our elected country. India and Thailand were out because they did not allocate children to families with two or more children but she suggested we try Sri Lanka as Australia had just made a commitment with them on adoption. More interviews. More paper work (it feels never ending). Our papers were finally sent to Colombo in 1979 approving us for a female child between the ages of 3 and 5 years. Again, all we could do was wait.

You need to understand that intercountry adoption was very rare in Australia, especially Tasmania. Some children had already come from Bangladesh, India and Thailand but none had come to Tassie from Sri Lanka. The government in Tasmania were very suspicious of procedure from other countries and made it very difficult for families, to be quite honest.

So we waited (again) and while we did, Michael and I joined an adoption group called ASIAC (http://www.asiac.org.au/).* The Tasmanian branch was affiliated with Victoria and we had a great deal of support from those members who had been through the process. ASIAC held fundraisers to assist orphanages directly and so we sent goods as well as money to one of the orphanages in Sri Lanka, the Good Shepherd Convent in Mankalum. I had already sent information about our family and had asked for their assistance in finding a child for us.

Because of ASIAC's generosity, one of the sisters (Sr Judith, the nun in the picture) wrote to the president of ASIAC in Victoria (At that time it was Dorothy Prevot) wanting to allocate a baby girl to a Tasmanian family with maybe two or more children. We had FINALLY been chosen!!!! Because our previous approval stated a 3-4 year old girl, we had to approach welfare without disclosing the possibility of a baby. After a lot of crawling (there really is no other word for it), we finally received the letter changing the country of approval.

We didn't tell welfare in Hobart about the allocation from Mankalum. Once before we had been given the opportunity of a little girl but they had put a stop to it as they were not happy with dealing with the Salvation Army home. So Dot in Melbourne and Sr Judith in Sri Lanka helped us to arrange everything to travel and stay in Colombo.

The government in Sri Lanka expected us to stay, have interviews with their child welfare departments and go to court. A process that would last 28 days. We wrote a letter to welfare in Hobart and informed them that we had travelled. They were not happy as they had not approved the Good Shepherd Convent for adoption. Nevertheless, we had already seen a lawyer in Tasmania and he told us to continue as we had done everything within the guidelines.

We had to be insane to leave our 3 kids at home and go to another country, not sure what was going to happen to us. We ended up being gone for six weeks. Weeks that were filled with a tonne of anxious moments but having the opportunity to add to our already beautiful family was like a dream come true. It has always been worth every step we took."

So that's Mum's story. Dad's is slightly different and explains that it all started when he was a kid and obsessed with (what was then) Ceylon. Now do you see why I know I'm so lucky? :)

*If you're interested in supporting kids via sponsorship, please consider ASIAC. They do amazing hands on work and you can sponsor a child for $20 a month.

For more information, please visit http://www.asiac.org.au/sponsorship.html
(For the record, World Vision's website states that you can sponsor a child through them -from- $43 per month. I'll let you draw your own conclusions as to why it's so expensive.)