Adopting eight kids from Africa
The story from both sides of the ocean
When the African orphanage started sending pictures of children, Hayley Jones’ stomach sank.
“I’m picking children,” she said. “That felt wrong.”
But Jones and her husband, Mike, knew without doubt they were meant to adopt from Africa. So they met with a woman from an orphanage in Sierra Leone, a place that housed sibling sets as large at eight.
Two weeks later, Mike Jones told his wife that they were supposed to adopt the biggest sibling set, seven brothers and their sister. His wife didn’t blink.
“When he said that’s where God is leading him, I was like, OK, that’s what we’re going to do,” Hayley Jones. “And that was it.”
The orphanage emailed names, ages and pictures of the eight siblings.
“From then,” Hayley Jones said through tears, “they were ours.”
The Joneses didn’t know those children grew up sleeping on the crowded floor of a leaky mud hut with no electricity, eating only rice and small animals they killed with sling shots or their hands, working in rice fields at 4:30 a.m. before school, and playing soccer with limes and oranges for balls.
Three years after first seeing their pictures, Hayley Jones and her dad flew from Africa to Nashville in March 2013 with her eight adopted children, then ages 5 to 16.
With their church family’s help, the Joneses made modifications to add bedrooms and bathrooms to their Thompson Station home. The kids were enrolled in public school, adapted well and all starting playing organized soccer.
Two of them signed deals with MLS teams this year, Malachi Jones with the New York City FC and Isaiah Jones with Nashville SC.
For Mother’s Day this year, Jones and the oldest of the siblings from West Africa, Michael Jones, sat down with The Tennessean to talk about their lives before, during and after the adoption. Hayley and Michael Jones also shared what they mean to each other.
“The biggest thing I’ve learned from Mom and Dad is unwavering faith,” Michael Jones said. “This journey took a lot out of them, emotionally, physically, financially, but they always trust that God has the final say.”
‘We were very naïve’
When Hayley and Mike Jones started dating in the late 1990s — the two met at First Baptist Church in Franklin — they each discovered the other had thought about adopting children from Africa.
For Hayley Jones, she felt herself drawn to the heartbreak and beauty of the continent she saw in TV public service ads for nonprofits sponsoring poor kids there.
“It was a longing for the place, a longing to be there and to help,” she said. “I always felt that one day, an opportunity will come.”
After the Joneses got married in 1999,
Hayley Jones had a very difficult birth with their first child five years later — she and the baby, Tyler, both nearly died after severe hemorrhaging. After their second son, Tucker, was born premature in 2009, the Joneses started talking seriously about adoption.
Hayley Jones, a kindergarten teacher, had a student who’d been adopted from Sierra Leone. Through that student, the Joneses got connected to an adoption agency in that country, The Raining Season, that had been started by a Tennessean.
“We knew it wouldn’t be easy,” Hayley Jones said, “but we were very naïve.”
The Joneses shared their plans with their older son, then 6, who prayed every night — God, help Mommy and Daddy get me another brother or sister.
‘He was going to die with them’
As a boy, Michael Jones, born Melvin Koroma, always hoped to grow up to be like his dad, a reliable provider and protector for the family. Like his dad, he got up early to work in the rice fields. The boy and his siblings also went back to work after school until 9 p.m., when the whole family went home for dinner, almost always rice. Sometimes they ate rats, squirrels or birds that one of them had killed that day.
“We never thought we don’t have enough food,” he said. “We always were satisfied with what we had.”
Most residents of their fishing village gathered around a fire for that end-ofday meal, often telling stories until bedtime. Sometimes the kids used fruit or wadded-up socks as balls to play soccer.
Some cousins slept at their family’s house, so more than 20 people usually slept on a floor in a space that wasn’t much bigger than a classroom.
His dad occasionally joined other villagers on boat trips to Sierra Leone’s capital city, Freetown — population 1 million — to do some trading.
That trip proved fatal Sept. 8, 2009, for his father and dozens of other village men when their crowded wooden boat capsized in a storm.
Michael Jones, just 11 years old at the time, remembers his mother and his uncles crying together in the middle of the night after a villager got a phone call with the devastating news.
“I didn’t believe it,” he said. “I know my dad was a really good swimmer. He was so strong.”
The boy later learned from one of the few survivors that his father never tried to swim to shore because he didn’t want to abandoned his brothers and a sister in the boat. “My dad said there was no way he was going to leave family members,” Michael Jones said quietly. “If they were going to die, he was going to die with them.”
A month or so later, Michael Jones and his seven siblings were on a hot, crowded bus heading over bumpy roads for a seven-hour ride to an orphanage in Freetown. Orphanage staffers fed bread to the children, and all of them vomited on the bus floor because they’d never had bread before and it upset their stomachs.
Michael Jones and the rest of the children also were upset that their surviving adult family members had sent them to an orphanage.
“It was those feeling that my family didn’t care much,” he said. “It was the easy way out.”
(He said he later changed his views,
realizing his mother and uncles made a difficult choice to send them to the orphanage, a decision he knows now they believed would be best for him and his siblings.)
‘That’s when we knew God was on our side’
Once they got to the orphanage, Michael Jones and his siblings found themselves in a concrete building, more stable than their village hut. They were eating better food and had better teachers than back at the village. The children missed their relatives and friends back home. And they had a tough time understanding the tribal languages the other kids spoke.
But Michael Jones loved seeing big city living and the successful men wearing suits and walking in and out of nice buildings. He and the others started reading the Bible for the first time at the Christian orphanage.
In school, the kids got introduced to American culture and saw a bunch of pictures of life in the U.S.’S biggest cities.
“The pastor in the orphanage told us America was ‘little heaven.’ We all believed if you come to America, your life would be the best ever. There’s not gonna be pain and nothing bad will happen to you.”
When he and his siblings were told an American family wanted to adopt them, Michael Jones cried with joy.
“That’s when we knew God was on our side,” he said.
Back in the States, the avalanche of paperwork and procedures started shortly after Hayley Jones told the orphanage she and her husband were in — home inspections, adoption training, physicals, criminal background checks, financial reviews,
The Sierra Leone government at the time said the country was closed for overseas adoptions. But the Joneses kept moving forward in hopes that would change. Hayley Jones started sending weekly letters to the “great eight,” including pictures of the house and of her husband, kids and dogs.
At the orphanage, the siblings gathered each week as a staff member translated those letters. Afterward, Michael Jones put them under his bed.
“I’m sleeping with my new family now,” he thought.
After a few months, Hayley Jones, then 28, decided she needed to visit these children. She got her first U.S. passport for her first trip overseas. And she got the recommended vaccinations for traveling to Africa.
‘I didn’t want to let go’
Hayley Jones traveled with a group of 10 Americans, and the kids at the orphanage, in white T-shirts, greeted them outside with a song: We welcome you in the name of Jesus Christ, you are precious in the sight of God.
“It was beyond moving,” Hayley Jones said, adding that, once inside for a short program, she locked eyes with Michael Jones right away.
“He looked at me with hope. It was a pour down of love,” she said. “And I thought, I will die — that is the only way I’m not seeing this through.”
When the program ended, Michael Jones and his siblings swarmed Hayley Jones, hugging her legs, playing with her hair, hugging her neck.
“I didn’t want to let go of you,” Michael Jones said during the interview, turning to his adoptive mother.
Hayley Jones split her time between Tennessee and Sierra Leone for the next three years, visiting Africa for several weeks at a time every few months, constantly visiting government offices to
make the adoption happen. Her husband coordinated efforts from their church, Grace Chapel in Leiper’s Fork, to get their home ready and to find suitable transportation for 12.
She often heard she and her husband should consider adopting only one or two, but Hayley Jones persisted — and in late 2012, the Sierra Leone government approved adoption of all eight siblings.
It took another several months, and massive lobbying of Tennessee’s federal elected officials, for the U.S. embassy to issue visas for the “great eight.” Michael Jones got a ride back to his village for a tearful goodbye with his mother and his uncles the day before he and his siblings were set to fly to America.
Making the goodbye harder for his biological mom were false accusations from villagers: You sold your family to the white people. (Since then, her older children in the U.S. have paid for a new home for her and sent her a laptop and a way to connect to the internet. The children do video calls with their biological mom at least once a month.)
A man from a nearby church paid for eight one-way tickets from Africa to Nashville, and other church members and friends donated thousands of dollars in cash, furniture, clothes and other needs. Still, Hayley and Mike Jones spent more than $100,000 to make the adoption happen.
All the efforts paid off when the plane with Haley Jones and her eight new children touched down in March 2013. About 80 relatives and friends were waiting at Nashville International Airport.
Spaghetti proved to be a challenge
“Seeing all the family members, that was one of the biggest excitements,” Michael Jones said, “but also I felt very nervous.”
The blended family had other challenges — the African children spoke little English, learning only a handful of words at the orphanage. Hayley Jones picked up some of the language spoken in Sierra Leone during her visits, but she wasn’t fluent.
So there were lots of hand gestures and motioning and hard times communicating at first.
And meals could be tough. The children often balked at the textures and tastes of even the most simple American meals, including spaghetti.
There were many meals where the children sat quietly, not eating, which Hayley Jones found upsetting.
“I cried in front of them twice; I had to leave the table,” Hayley Jones said.
“It was exhausting, with all the kids at home at first. I’d do games all day, cooking every single meal, and it was very tiring. When they didn’t eat, I felt like, I’m failing.”
Within months, though, most of the kids were in school, they were learning English quickly and American food became more palatable. Michael Jones fell in love with Chick-fil-a sandwiches and ketchup, which he now puts on pizza.
And the entire family grew together in Christian faith and in a shared love of soccer.
“At night, we have our family devotion time, we read the Bible, pray and go to bed,” Michael Jones said. “Those are the things that help shape us.
“I could not have asked for a better family, the way they open their arms,” he said. “In this family, everyone’s equal, everyone is loved. It’s one of the best gifts I could’ve ever asked for.”
Asked for four words to describe his mother, Michael Jones picked: Caring, fun, faithful, superhero.
Hayley Jones said it is she who gets the blessings.
“It’s a beautiful journey. It doesn’t mean it’s free of pain or hardship. But it shows God can redeem any trauma. That’s the story of our family.”
Reach Brad Schmitt at brad@tennessean.com or 615-259-8384.