Enjoy the read…….
Words tumble out of little Sam Wilkins’ mouth in the mumbled, husky run-on of a whirligig toddler.
Fish, shoe, coat.
Dump truck, latte, no.
Starbucks!
Elmo!
Awesome!
Daddy.
All of the words are recent acquisitions, but the last one has special meaning for Sam’s parents, Jill and Joe Wilkins. Joe, 38, a Beaverton third-grade teacher, took the winter and spring off work to get to know his first child after collecting him during a dramatic airlift of 82 Haitian orphans after the catastrophic Jan. 12 earthquake.
It is a peas-and-carrots kind of kinship. In adoption parlance, they are “bonded.” When you see them, taking part in a baby swim class for instance, where Joe swirls Sam under the water like a porpoise, setting off a sputter of giggles, they look like something more mundane, something without quotation marks. A father. A son.
“He likes the water,” says Joe, once an All-American relay and back stroke swimmer at Linfield College in McMinnville, and, more recently, a swim coach. A half-smile plays on his lips as Sam dips his head underwater and pops up in a blink with a blissful look on his wet face.
“He’s a fish. A true Wilkins.”
In retrospect, after a baby moves to his forever home, taking on a new name and a new world, adoption stories can seem rather straightforward.
Not Sam’s tale.
The Wilkinses set off down the international adoption road in January 2007. Two years, reams of paperwork and an excruciating wait later, Dixie Bickel, director of the God’s Littlest Angels orphanage in the hills above Port-au-Prince, matched the Wilkinses with Samuel Chancelet — an anime-eyed infant whom Bickel posed in his first holiday photo in a white fleecy romper and a tan-and-red reindeer cap.
Childless after a dozen years of marriage, the Wilkinses said yes, of course, yes.
Soon, they watched the boy with the long lashes and open gaze during a webcam visit from their sleek Southwest Portland split-level. Joe wiped away tears as his son-to-be fidgeted in Haiti, tapping the computer keys and generally missing the import of the occasion.
It mattered not. They flew to visit the 14-month-old in Haiti, first in July 2009. Joe stayed two weeks longer and caught the baby’s first words on video: “Mama!”
They returned to Haiti in December. When they arrived, Jill grabbed the camera and pointed it in the baby sleeping room.
I wonder if he’ll recognize you? Jill asked. Say his name. So Joe whispered, “Samuel.” In a shaky video of the moment, Sam careens around his roommates and leaps into Joe’s arms.
Last Christmas, Bickel sent a card with her staffers’ descriptions of the 19-pound, 30-inch tall boy the Wilkinses already thought of as Sam: “Chancelet is …”
And they wrote:
affectionate
smiley
energetic
curious
adorable
petite
bright-eyed
outgoing.”
Jill and Joe learned on Dec. 29 that their adoption paperwork made it through Stage 1 of the labyrinthine Haitian regional court system. Still before them the next year: Stage 2, a layer of bureaucracy known as attestation, approval by the minister of justice and other Port-au-Prince agencies, and finally, American visa and passport hoops.
Then, the quake:
On the day it struck, the couple watched the horror unfold online and on their TV screens. No matter how long it took, they agreed, it was time to help the orphanage and to bring Sam, then 20 months, home. Joe called his boss and asked for an indefinite leave of absence.
He arrived in Miami and for three days helped gather much-needed water, food, blankets, tents and medicine for an emergency charter flight. A week after the 7.0 quake, Joe flew to Haiti with the supplies, bound for the God’s Littlest Angels orphanage and its hard-hit neighbors in the Kenscoff Mountains above Port-au-Prince.
Jill, 38, arrived in Miami one day later. Director of internal communications for a Portland computer hardware company, Jill had taken on the political and media fronts. That involved calling lawmakers, engaging reporters, e-mailing and writing letters, anything to press the Haitian and U.S. governments to jointly streamline the last steps for children poised to be adopted internationally.
Though Joe got to work behind the green gates of the orphanage, checking for cracks in the building and towing armloads of rattled children to the open-air lanai, Jill organized more than 55 GLA adoptive parents of kids marooned in Haiti. She coordinated their message for television and newspaper interviews.
These kids have families and their paperwork is already legit, Jill’s message went. If the governments let them leave, GLA is in the position to take on many of those newly orphaned by the quake.
Both Joe and Jill blogged the crisis. Larry King questioned them about the fate of the kids. The other parents told their stories on newscasts around the country. The Dutch government evacuated children adopted by their citizens. Seven hundred miles apart, the Wilkinses clawed away at their own bureaucratic mountain. The mountain was no match.
On Jan. 18, the U.S. State Department announced that some Haitian orphans, including Sam, would be eligible for humanitarian parole, a proverbial snip through layers of bureaucracy that would allow GLA to fly dozens of orphans to Miami before the full and final completion of their adoptions.
Back in Haiti, Sam wasn’t verbal yet, but his eyes and his contagious smile sang.
Orphanage staffers prepared the 82 children for a next-day airlift out of Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince. Aftershocks rattled the island nation and the children’s nerves.
Sam lost his cool for a moment, scrambling after a fleeing line of toddlers. Joe, one of a small number of parents on hand to help, cooed him back to calm.
He is a mellow boy. Lounging against teacher Ruth Charles’s bosom in the hourlong caravan to the airport, dandled from the hip of an Army sergeant on the hay-covered airfield, he made not a peep. But he watched when Joe stepped away and when their eyes met, Sam looked at Joe conspiratorially.
Tears spilled when they emerged after four hours in the air and eight hours in a U.S. immigration holding area at Miami International Airport, to formally reunite with Jill, whose labors on behalf of Sam and his fellow orphans were culminating in a wrenching moment.
“We waited so long for this,” Jill choked out, clutching Sam close. Married 15 years and ready to grow their family for many of those, Joe watched, red-eyed.
Last Sunday, many bad neckties, barbecue accessories and straight-to-the-garage gewgaws were no doubt gifted to perfectly wonderful fathers.
Sam, via his mom, gave his dad a sweet gas grill.
After summer’s end, Sam will start preschool. Joe, a hands-on dad, is making the most of the time they have left to hang out together.
A few days a week, they stop by Starbucks and deliver a triple-shot Venti vanilla latte to Jill at work. After dinner, they take a “boy’s walk” around the block while she tackles the dishes.
Joe waits, arms so wide, at the bottom of the slide at Roxbury Park. He pulls Sam uphill in his red little wagon. He wipes the applesauce from Sam’s chin and tucks him between island-themed bedsheets in his blue and mahogany bedroom for late-morning naps. He holds Sam close at doctor’s visits, whispering comfort when the shots begin. He roars back when Sam lets loose a classic lion roar. He watches over bath time, still a little stunned, while his son, the fish, splashes in delight.
Every day feels like Father’s Day. And now that Sam is talking, sprinkling new-minted phrases like happy tears, it sounds like it, too.
“Daddy,” Sam says, “I love you.”
– Kimberly A.C. Wilson
