EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first of a two-part series about Adoption Advocates International.
PORT ANGELES — Inside a plain Jane of a house on Peabody Street, families are born.
These families grow, fed by faith that despite differences in culture and country, despite sadness and trauma, children can form new bonds with new parents.
Adoption Advocates International is an agency begun nearly three decades ago by Ted and Merrily Ripley.
Stop in on any given day and see Merrily, now the director, and she’ll tell you about a child or several children who are waiting for a home.
Last month, Ripley received news of five brothers, ages 1, 3, 5, 6 and 7: all orphaned, all living in a crowded orphanage outside the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa.
Siblings adopted together
To the uninitiated, the boys’ chances of being placed together look slim. But Ripley, 67, speaks with a calm confidence of the many families who have adopted brothers and sisters together.
This year, Adoption Advocates has matched nearly 300 children with adoptive parents, across the United States and abroad.
More than half of the adoptees are Ethiopian, including children from Layla House, the home and school Adoption Advocates operates in Addis Ababa.
The agency also matches children — often with special needs and health problems such as HIV — from Thailand, Ghana and China with parents. Children in foster care in Washington state also find new families through the house on Peabody street.
Many are orphans; some were abandoned or sent to live with other family members who ultimately couldn’t care for them.
Adoption Advocates works with each nation’s government to match children with new families, who pay as much as $15,000 by the time the adoption process is complete.
That journey can take more than a year, Ripley said, and can include a trip to Ethiopia for the parents.
No recession in adoptions
“It’s interesting. The recession hasn’t affected us,” she said. During tough times, “people reassess their values and what they want to do in their lifetimes.”
Sometimes that includes opening their home to one child, or to a sibling group.
“We try to keep siblings together. We’re always looking for families who can take two or three or more,” Ripley said.
“We don’t want kids to lose each other. They have lost so much already.”
When a child comes to Layla House, he or she is given a health assessment, placed in the appropriate grade in school — and the staff makes a DVD showing them in class or at play.
“Then we look at the list of waiting families,” Ripley said, and send the DVD out.
John and Suzanne Hayden of Port Angeles took the leap of faith three years ago, and adopted Abinet, now 14, and his sister Netsanet, 10.
The couple traveled to Layla House at Christmas time, where “it was about 800 degrees,” John recalled.
Santa in Ethiopia
He’s an attorney back home — but upon arrival in Ethiopia, John was persuaded to portray Santa Claus.
“I was the only white guy who would do it,” he joked; Suzanne added that there was a Santa suit waiting there.
The process of adopting their son and daughter took about nine months. The agency was, Suzanne said, “awesome.”
Ted Ripley, also a Port Angeles attorney, was among the agency people who provided support as the Haydens and their children were adjusting to each other.
“One day when Abinet was throwing a fit — just the normal adoption stuff — Ted just came over,” and helped the family through, Suzanne said.
The Ripleys have ample experience: Starting in 1969 they adopted 17 children in addition to the three born to them. Now they are caring for two of their grandchildren, ages 4 and 8.
Life as an adoptive family is “ups and downs; fortunately, mostly ups,” Ripley said.
Easier for siblings
When asked about their decision to adopt two children at once, Suzanne said she believes it is easier, in some ways, for siblings to come into a new family.
“They can walk into this totally foreign culture holding hands,” she said.
Now Ripley and her 13-member staff are taking the agency into a new realm.
“We have begun thinking of AAI as a humanitarian organization, as well as an adoption agency,” the director notes in her Christmas letter to adoptive families and other supporters.
Adoption Advocates provides sponsorship for more than 500 orphans in Ethiopia and Ghana, Ripley said, so that the children can stay with extended-family members and receive some financial help.
“We call this ‘family preservation,’ and believe that with older children especially, it is best to have them remain in their birth country if their needs can be met there,” she said.
Dessie School
Adoption Advocates also finished a major project this year: the Dessie School in an impoverished area of northern Ethiopia, where 1,200 children, more than half of them girls, attend classes.
In Ghana, the agency is providing assistance to two orphanages that previously provided only basic care, and has initiated family-preservation sponsorships.
At the same time, the agency supports programs for Ethiopian and Ghanaian children with the AIDS virus.
“The wonderful thing is that we are now placing many children who are HIV-positive, and getting medication that allows them a nearly normal life,” Ripley writes in her holiday letter.
“HIV-positive children have been placed from Ghana, Thailand and China as well as from Ethiopia, and it is expected that nearly 50 HIV-positive children will join families this year.
“This is amazing when you realize that just 10 years ago, we were raising money to develop a hospice home,” for AIDS-afflicted youngsters.
The agency depends on donations to fund its humanitarian projects, Ripley said. And like many such organizations, it’s expanding its Web presence from its main site at www.AdoptionAdvocates.org to a blog, www.aainew.blogspot.com, and a gift-shopping site at www.BenefitOrphans.org.
The agency also urges adoptive families to maintain their connections to their children’s birth countries, by sponsoring a child or organizing fundraisers.
One family in Minnesota, for example, had a community pancake breakfast to benefit the Ethiopian sponsorship program.
Adoptions have changed the lives of so many children, Ripley said. But “we want to do more in the countries where we work.”
On Monday: One family’s experience.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
