Girls’ Rescue From Haiti Expands Family by Two
Girls’ Rescue From Haiti Expands Family by Two
By SUSAN SAULNY
Published: January 25, 2010
ROCA, Neb. — Dieunette babbles a constant stream of baby talk and flashes big expressive eyes, but she has trouble sleeping and is fussy from fighting a tapeworm. Bettania is a quiet explorer, spending her days walking from room to room, running her hands over the grand piano, flicking light switches on and off, staring at the billiards table and fireplace, all the while silent but clearly in fascination.
Enlarge This Image
Jeff Swensen for The New York Times
Bettania, 7, and Dieunette, 2, escaped the devastation of Haiti to find a new home with Scott Heaton, above, and his wife, Kristin, in Nebraska.
Related
53 Haitian Orphans Are Airlifted to U.S. (January 20, 2010)
A Deadly Quake in a Seismic Hot Zone (January 26, 2010)
Agreement on Effort to Help Haiti Rebuild (January 26, 2010)
A Factory Sputters Back to Life in Haiti (January 26, 2010)
Haiti Disaster Relief: How to Contribute | Tips on Donating
More Multimedia on the Haiti Earthquake
Enlarge This Image
Jeff Swensen for The New York Times
Kristin Heaton with Dieunette at their home in Roca, Neb.
Enlarge This Image
Jeff Swensen for The New York Times
Bettania looked out into her snowy backyard in Nebraska on her first morning in the Heaton home.
Enlarge This Image
Jeff Swensen for The New York Times
The Heaton family prayed during the girls’ first meal there.
One week ago, the two little girls, now the most celebrated new residents of this tiny town, had lives confined to the concrete walls of a Haitian orphanage, beside a ravine clogged with the bodies of earthquake victims.
Desperate for food and water, Bettania, 7, and Dieunette, 2, were among 53 children whisked out of the ruins of their group home in Port-au-Prince on Jan. 19 in a high-profile rescue made possible by the easing of immigration requirements between the United States and Haiti.
Dieunette arrived caked in dried diarrhea. Bettania’s clothing had to be burned. But they spent the weekend here in rural Nebraska cuddling on a plush sofa, feet warmed by a fire, outfitted like princesses, being hugged and kissed as they ate and drank, laughed and played with a toy poodle. They looked thoroughly contented — perhaps for the first time in their short lives.
“I knew God would find a way to bring them home, but who would have thought like this, through a catastrophic disaster?” said Kristin Heaton, their 49-year-old adoptive mother. “Can you hear them giggling away? It doesn’t feel real.”
“Can you say ‘Thank you, Grandma?’ ” Mrs. Heaton prodded Bettania as her own mother wiped the child’s mouth after a lunch of vegetable burritos.
Silence.
“She watched TV with me, and that’s enough,” said the grandmother, Marlene Herrmann. “She’ll talk when she’s ready.”
Bettania put her chin down and smiled toward her feet.
The earthquake that flattened much of Port-au-Prince almost two weeks ago expedited an adoption process that was already three years old for Kristin and Scott Heaton, delivering the girls in one abrupt, bittersweet finale. Now Bettania and Dieunette have, among so many other things, a new last name — if not quite by law yet, the Heatons say, then by the often stronger rules of love and attachment.
The couple, with one biological daughter, Victoria, 17, and an adopted son, Nathaniel, 20, had looked to Haiti for their next adoption because of its extreme poverty. Victoria did a report for school on the country, was shocked and helped spur some of the family’s activism there.
“Scott and I, one thing we’ve both said is that we can’t think of anything we’d rather do than raise these children and make a difference,” said Mrs. Heaton, who visited Haiti every three months over the last several years to check on Bettania and Dieunette and take supplies to their orphanage.
Before the girls’ arrival on Friday night, their two rooms had been ready for months, painted in pastels and adorned with their pictures, flowers and butterflies, the closets stocked with dresses and dolls. Mr. Heaton, the vice president of an auto sales company, mixed a lotion of shea butter and olive oil to care for their hair and skin. He also built a playhouse behind their six-bedroom colonial house, next to a creek in the five-acre backyard.
In the children’s bathroom, Mrs. Heaton stenciled her thoughts: “Having someone to love is family. Having somewhere to go is home. Having both is a blessing.”
The years of waiting were wrenching. The Heatons first got to know Dieunette when she was 6 months old and suffering from an ailment that left her brain partly exposed. They volunteered to host her while she underwent emergency brain surgery at a hospital in Omaha. The Heatons, however attached, returned Dieunette to her mother in Haiti.
Then, in September 2008, a powerful hurricane swept through her town, Gonaïves, and the baby’s home was all but washed away. Her mother, already on the edge, could no longer care for the child and put her up for adoption. The Heatons jumped at the opportunity to have Dieunette join their family.
But the process was delayed, and after this month’s earthquake, there were days of uncertainty about the girls’ fate. The Heatons were panicked and in despair until a text message came through from the orphanage: alive, it said.
Several sleepless nights followed, as the Heatons lobbied anyone with power or connections to Haiti, and spent hours and hours in prayer. On Jan. 18, almost a week after the quake, the good news finally came in the form of a new policy: the United States was loosening its visa requirements for parentless children in near-final stages of adoption.
It immediately affected 900 children. The first wave of rescues were flown to Pittsburgh the next day, treated at a hospital, and matched with their American families after hasty immigration hearings in a makeshift court. Other planes with rescued orphans have touched down since, and more airlifts are on the way. But beyond those with adoptions in process, tens of thousands of children are believed to have been orphaned in the quake, and their fate remains unclear, aid groups say.
The Heatons, who had rushed to Pittsburgh, returned to Omaha on Friday night greeted by throngs of well-wishers toting teddy bears and balloons. From there, the family drove southwest to their hilltop house here amid pastoral rolling hills.
The girls had a restless first night but seemed happy by the morning, eager to rush onto an outdoor deck and eat snow.
Bettania can understand a little English, but no one is sure how much. Her schooling has been minimal.
Dieunette often squirms in her baby seat. “Do you want your food?” Mrs. Heaton asked. “Do you want to sit in my lap?”
Ms. Herrmann wondered, “Do you want an orange?”
Mr. Heaton, 47, was clear about the family’s goal in the short term: “just spoil them rotten.”
In the longer term, they are likely to be home-schooled until ready to join their peers in class, and the Heatons want them to know and love Haiti as much as they do.
“These are two lives, and that’s fantastic, but this is not over,” Mrs. Heaton said. “What about the thousands of others? It’s not a problem; it’s a crisis. We have to cry out for these orphans because they don’t have a voice.”
Faint as it was, Bettania slowly seemed to be finding her own tiny voice. She finally spoke Saturday afternoon, pointing to a picture of Mr. Heaton on a wall.
“Dad,” she said.
.