Adoption agency bankruptcy leaves Maritime families in limbo

Adoption agency bankruptcy leaves Maritime families in limbo

Last Updated: Friday, July 17, 2009 | 11:02 AM AT Comments0Recommend5

CBC News

The sudden closure of an Ontario-based international adoption agency has left some Maritime families who were waiting to adopt Ethiopian children in limbo.

Kids Link, which runs Imagine Adoption, based in Cambridge, Ont., posted a bankruptcy notice on its website Monday. For the last two years, it had helped Canadians adopt children from Ethiopia, Ghana and Ecuador.

Jessie-Lee Lomax, of Bouctouche, N.B., was in the middle of adopting a 14-year-old girl, Yordanos, from Ethiopia.

Two years ago, Lomax and her husband adopted Yordanos's twin sisters, Sefen and Helina, who are now 10.

Now there are few options for reuniting the family, Lomax said Thursday.

"We’ve re-mortgaged our house and sold most of our worldly possessions to try and finance the second adoption. We are fiscally tapped out, so we don’t even have the option of trying to pursue it with another agency," Lomax said.

In the last year, the family has spent $17,000 on paperwork and fees in their attempt to adopt Yordanos.

"That's a huge amount of money to have to put out for no possibility of a child or a family," Lomax said.

She is also very concerned about the well-being of Yordanos, who is living in Ethiopia’s capital and now doesn’t know whether she will be able to come to Canada.

"We’re one of the last hopes she has of managing to make a life out of something. I think you can imagine what a 13- or 14-year-old girl deserted in a city like Addis Ababa would have for chances," Lomax said.

She said it could take months or years to settle anything with Imagine Adoption.

'No longer going to have a child'

In Nova Scotia, Maxine Frosst was both angry and grief-stricken.

Frosst and her husband, Melvin, were expecting to find out any day that their request to adopt a boy from Ethiopia had been approved. The nursery is all ready.

"I feel personally like I've been in my ninth month of pregnancy and someone on Monday told me I'm no longer going to have a child," Maxine Frosst said.

The Pictou County couple have three children, including one adopted from China. Every day they ask about their brother, Frosst said.

On top of the loss of a child, the family is out $15,000. Frosst said the payment to the agency was supposed to go to transition houses for children in Africa.

Frosst said both she and her husband researched the agency before starting the adoption process. They're working with other families to get information and tp find out what happened to the children they were supposed to bring to Canada.

'We're willing to do what it takes'

Debbie Thomas of New Maryland, N.B., has invested $15,000 to adopt two Ethiopian children.

Thomas said a network of families is working together to try to get the adoptions to go through, and working with the province is one step in the right direction.

"We think it’s going to require the government to think outside the box. This isn’t a typical circumstance, but it doesn’t mean it’s not doable," Thomas said.

"And we think there are enough passionate people involved that we’re willing to do what it takes to seek the people themselves that can help us."

Allison Aiton, a spokeswoman with the New Brunswick Department of Social Development, said the province is working with the federal government to help the families caught in limbo.

But a major problem will be getting access to the adoption files from the bankrupt agency, she said.

Madeleine Dubé, a New Brunswick MLA and Opposition critic, wants the province to work with the Ontario government to help families. It’s also time to look at what New Brunswick could be doing to help with adoption cases, she said.

"We don’t have any international agencies in the province. We need to question a little bit how we do things and how can we make sure we actually protected families," Dubé said.

.