GUATEMALA CITY — It should have been good news.
The U.S. Embassy called to say the Guatemalan government would begin to authorize adoptions five years after a scandal froze the system that sent as many as 4,000 Guatemalan children a year to the United States.
Ryan “Bubba” Hooker and his wife, Jess, might finally be able to collect the little boy they wanted to adopt and bring him home.
But Bubba wasn’t sure. This would be his 36th trip to Guatemala City. The 18-month-old toddler they had met in an orphanage was now a 6-year-old kindergartener. The couple had moved homes, passed up a job and spent untold amounts of money trying to adopt Daniel.
If all went well, they were told, they would be the first U.S. family to adopt under the Central American nation’s new adoption laws. At least, that’s what they told him over the phone.
On Aug. 21, Bubba boarded the plane for Guatemala City. All he had to do was get an adoption certificate, a birth certificate and a passport, meet with the people at the U.S. Embassy again, get an adoption visa, and then he and Jess could bring Daniel home.
Jess and Bubba had been married less than a year when they decided to go to Guatemala on a mission trip in June 2007.
The day he met Daniel, Bubba had been working on the plumbing in the orphanage when he decided to take a break. He took a wander through the rooms and found the boy.
The child was just 18 months old but looked younger, sitting in a walker. He was the youngest kid in the orphanage, the frailest, too, with his pigeon chest and little legs that turned out. Bubba knelt beside the little boy and they began to play. Before long Bubba was holding him, then he fed him. He forgot about the plumbing.
It wasn’t until that night that he told his wife.
“I think I met our son,” Bubba said.
At 28, Jess was five years older than her husband and the more practical partner. She listened as he told her about his day with the boy, who wasn’t just cute, he said, but his name was Daniel, just like Bubba’s uncle who had just died. She was skeptical.
“Uh oh,” she thought, “what has Bubba gotten us into?”
But the next day, when she pulled the child into her arms, she felt like he was hers.
The couple had always wanted to adopt. Daniel just sped up their plans. They told the orphanage director and started the paperwork.
Two months later, Guatemala’s adoption industry fell apart.
The country’s quick-stop adoptions had made the nation of 14 million people the world’s second-largest source of babies to the U.S. after China. But the vibrant business came to a halt after an August 2007 raid on what was considered the country’s most reputable adoption agency, used by many Americans.
An investigation exposed a system of fake birth certificates and DNA samples, of mothers coerced into giving up children. Some claimed their children were kidnapped for sale. Adoptive parents paid up to $30,000 for a child in a country where the average person earns $5,000 a year.
The Guatemalan government was forced to overhaul its adoption laws. The U.S. suspended all new adoptions from Guatemala.
Daniel was among 3,032 children caught in limbo.
“It is not official”
In October 2008, Jess traveled to Guatemala with her mother over her school’s fall break. It was her fourth visit.
She expected to see Daniel running around, arms flailing with hints of baby talk. Instead, there was silence.
Something was wrong, but she was not Daniel’s legal guardian. Jess couldn’t take him to see a pediatrician.
Five months later, Daniel still wasn’t talking.
At the Radisson Hotel, where the Hookers started the first of many family visits, he would race to the window inside their room to watch the airplanes. He was obsessed with them. But when Bubba gave him headphones, Daniel always tore off the one in his right ear.
He needed to see a specialist. The adoption could not come soon enough. They had hoped their connections to the orphanage, their family’s story, would make things easier because some adoptions pending when the ban was imposed were being allowed to go through.
But though they had filed reams of paperwork, nothing seemed to be happening, and no one could tell them why. Finally, in May 2009, they got a call confirming a meeting with the adoption council’s head, Jaime Tecu.
After hours in the waiting room with Daniel and Jess’ mom, Judy, who would translate, they were ushered into an office overlooking the south of the capital. Then the bombshell.
“I’m sorry,” Tecu said, “your case is not registered with the Solicitor General’s office. It is not official.”
Judy began to sob. Bubba was furious.
Jess was crushed.
Everything had to be investigated anew.
In May 2010, a week-long trip turned into a three-week stay when the Pacaya volcano, about 25 miles south of Guatemala City, began spewing lava and rocks, blanketing the capital with ash and closing the international airport.
The Hookers used the extra time with Daniel to take him to an audiologist. When the doctor walked in to give the results, they already knew — Daniel was almost completely deaf.
Not an easy way to live
The Hookers created a routine between regular trips to the Radisson in Guatemala and life back home in Maryville, Tenn. Jess took advantage of holidays at the high school where she worked, while Bubba, a real estate developer, set his own schedule so he could visit Daniel every two or three months.
It was not an easy way to live.
They turned down a job offer overseas that they feared would have further complicated the adoption process.
When Daniel was 4 and there was still no end in sight, Jess gave birth to a daughter, Ellyson.
On their visits at the Radisson when Jess was pregnant, Daniel would touch her belly and say, “Sister.”
Jess felt like she was missing Daniel’s entire childhood — his first steps, his first words.
And then came some luck.
In early 2011, the Guatemalan adoption fiasco came to the attention of U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, who served on the Senate appropriations subcommittee on the State Department’s foreign operations and related programs, which dealt with foreign adoptions. She also presided over the Senate appropriations subcommittee on homeland security, which funds U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
She was also the mother of two adopted children.
She assembled a team of staff and immigration services experts to help Guatemalans sift through the files and find out which ones had the proper records, making five trips to the country herself.
Of the original 3,032 cases interrupted at the end of 2007, officials found 180 cases of children still waiting to be adopted.
The first of these cases was Daniel’s.
In December, the Hookers got a call saying they were one of 44 families whose cases were ready to move forward.
It would still be another eight months before they embarked Aug. 21, hoping to become the first of those families eligible to collect their child.
Finally going home
Early Saturday morning, they checked out of the Radisson for the last time. An airport shuttle arrived at Guatemala’s La Aurora Airport. Out came Jess and her mom, Bubba, baby Ellyson and Daniel. Everyone wore matching red-and-white Maryville High T-shirts. There was even a small one with a big embroidered M at the center for Daniel.
“I’ve been waiting so long to carry you like this,” Jess told Daniel.
“Avion,” he replied, the Spanish word for plane, a huge smile on his face.
He gave his momma a kiss and motioned to be put on the floor. He went over to Ellyson and started to open his arms wide and spun like a plane. She giggled and mimicked him.
Meanwhile, Bubba was grabbing their boarding passes.
After all his family visits, he had accrued 700,000 frequent flier miles he had been saving for the day he would take his son home. Soon, they would be sitting in first class. The plane was set to take off just before 1 p.m.
When asked how she thought Daniel would adapt to the room and house back in Maryville, she laughed.
“I think he’s going to be a bit disappointed when we get home and he realizes there is no pool on our roof, no elevator, and he can’t watch planes from the window,” she said.
As the family walked through the doors of the Louisville airport late Saturday night, friends cheered, then joined them in prayer.
“We did it! We made it! And we can’t believe it!” the family said in an e-mailed message to friends Sunday. “I wish you all could have seen Daniel’s face as he ran around our house exploring his new domain. He couldn’t believe he had his own room. He gawked at the size of our bathtub … It was AWESOME!”
