The pandemic put families in international adoption limbo
Sameena Gulamali and Jauher Ahmad first met their twins at an orphanage in Morocco in November 2019 when the toddlers were 18 months old. The Toronto couple hoped to be on their way home with their son and daughter well before the twins’ second birthday the following spring.
But then the coronavirus pandemic hit, and Morocco closed its borders to all travelers in mid-March of 2020. No one could get in or out.
“You can imagine how devastated we were when we heard the news,” said Gulamali, who has three other children also adopted from Morocco. “Once the borders closed, my every waking moment was consumed with thoughts of my babies and how I could bring them home. Days quickly turned to weeks and weeks into months.”
Morocco’s borders remained closed past the twins’ second birthday and the Eid holiday that the family celebrates. “I spent many nights crying myself to sleep, just praying for a miracle,” she said.
I met Gulamali in September when she was finally able to travel to Morocco to get her twins, almost a year after she had first met them. My youngest son, whose second birthday I also missed, lived in the same orphanage in Casablanca. We became fast friends, two moms from different countries just trying to get our children home. When a coronavirus outbreak – and then the chickenpox – closed the orphanage to visitors, Gulamali and I, along with several other parents, traded information about how our children were doing inside the locked gates.
Like Gulamali, I had planned to travel to Morocco in March and couldn’t wait to meet a little boy I had only seen through pictures and short videos sent from the orphanage director. After my trip was canceled, my packed suitcase sat on the floor in my bedroom for weeks before I moved it out of sight, still stuffed with clothes and toys for my new son. I finally unpacked it in late June, but I couldn’t shake the unbearable unknown of when I would get it out again.
With most global travel halted last year and restrictions still in place in some countries even now, many families adopting from overseas have been stuck in anguished suspense. Those fortunate enough to travel after being in limbo for months have faced costly increases to carefully budgeted trips, new testing and quarantining procedures and the apprehension of traveling in a deadly pandemic that has killed more than 2.5 million people worldwide. In some cases, adoption approvals from the U.S. government have expired, prompting costly and time-consuming renewals at federal agencies still working through backlogs from the early months of the coronavirus outbreak.
Each morning last summer I checked the number of coronavirus infections in Morocco through a Facebook group I joined, and watched for news about when I might be able to travel with my 8-year-old and 5-year-old sons to meet their little brother. By midsummer, Morocco’s infection rates had started to level off, but cases were soaring in many parts of the United States. When I finally learned in August that I could go, I had to scramble to find coronavirus and antibody tests within 72 hours of our departure, which was required by the Moroccan government. I just made it, and we left for Casablanca from an eerily
empty Washington Dulles International Airport the first week in August.
China, which has the most children adopted and brought to the United States, is still closed to waiting families. Last spring, while first reporting about the delays in adoption, Allison Singleton told me about her daughter in China. The South Carolina family was matched with the girl when she was 7. She will turn 9 this summer.
“My heart aches to go get my child,” Singleton said. “Chinese officials are telling us we still need to wait until covid numbers are down globally. We are really hoping that they will open adoptions back up by June. We feel that vaccinations and warmer weather will hopefully help China feel more comfortable opening up adoption travel again.”
Susan Soon-keum Cox, a vice president at Holt International Children’s Services, said the Oregon-based adoption agency has 45 families who have been matched with children in China and are just waiting to go. She said the agency has been checking in with them regularly, particularly about changes the families may have experienced, including lost jobs.
There have been hopeful signs from China in recent weeks when families received Lunar New Year greetings from the government, Cox said.
“They’ve made it very clear that the reason for no travel is the pandemic, and it’s nothing more than that,” she said. “One of the reassuring things is we’re not aware of any children who [contracted] covid.”
The U.S. State Department declined to disclose the number of adoption visas issued in 2020 ahead of their scheduled release later this year. But the number will almost certainly be down from the 2,971 international adoptions in 2019. Of those, 819 were from China.
South Korean adoptions – there were 166 in 2019 – never stopped during the pandemic, but families were and still are required to quarantine for 14 days, said Timothy Sutfin, executive director of New Beginnings, an adoption agency based in New York that has programs in Korea, China, Thailand and Morocco.
“The two-week mandatory quarantine essentially changed the program from two one-week trips into one long trip lasting around seven weeks,” he said. “There are additional expenses and work issues. There can be child care issues when the family does not travel with the children or school issues when the children do travel.”
I arrived in Morocco before the adoption courts had reopened. My lawyer couldn’t understand why I had come if I couldn’t formally start the process. But I knew I needed to have all of my children in one place, or at least under the same flag, for what I expected to be about a 10-week stay. We ultimately remained in Morocco closer to four months.
The trip was hard on my older sons, who were trying to attend remote school in Chicago with a seven-hour time difference. I often worked through the night to do my own job as a professor and magazine editor. After changing our flights home twice, I started to panic about the money I was spending on winter clothes, rent and additional lawyer fees. Friends and family chipped in to give us some cushion.
It was also hard being so isolated. At home I had been riding out the pandemic with my neighbors, from a distance in our backyards and through the open windows of our lives filtering in and out. We weren’t able to travel in Morocco to see friends, and we only met our neighbors when they came to complain about the noise the boys were making. The beaches were closed, and the little things I always loved about being in Morocco started to annoy me in the isolation and difficulty of the pandemic. I felt guilty about what I was putting my older sons through for the sake of their little brother.
And yet I was able to see my youngest son in person, and cherished seeing him come to life, going from an unsmiling toddler who cried and didn’t want to play to an active 2-year-old with an insatiable appetite for food – and for love. By early October, he was running to jump into my arms when I came to visit. I am convinced that this made it easier when I was finally granted custody in early November and started the final process to get the necessary permissions for him to leave the country, including an extra requirement all Moroccan citizens need to travel because of the pandemic. (One American couple adopting an infant from another orphanage in Morocco got turned away at the airport in September when they arrived for their flight home without this paper. They came home about a week later.)
In the months since we’ve been home, I haven’t been able to celebrate our new arrival in the same way I had when I adopted my older boys. We haven’t seen most of our family. We were alone for the Christmas holiday. In some respects, however, it’s been better for my 2-year-old. He’s been able to adjust more slowly, with fewer new faces and experiences that could be overwhelming.
One weekend Gulamali arranged a video call with all of the 2-year-olds who were adopted last fall. I watched my son excitedly wave and babble at his playmates from the orphanage. After the call ended, he pointed to the phone and made the sign for more. My 6-year-old reached for him. “Group hug?” he asked. And we leaned into each other, laughing together.