Chapter 1

Faces that Stay

“We are only as blind as we want to be.”

—MAYA ANGELOU

It was their little faces that first pulled at my heart. As Mark and I sat together on the couch watching the TV screen in front of us, the images we saw shocked us into silence. Rows and rows of tiny babies. Some were tied to bamboo chairs. Some lay in metal cribs, others rocked back and forth, over and over.The Dying Rooms is a chilling documentary. It exposes the truth of the conditions in many Chinese orphanages. We sat together crying silent tears as we watched. Beyond the rooms of countless children, there was another room. This one housed a single dying baby. This baby lay alone, dying a torturous death. Her skeletal frame was curled up; skin stretched over her bones. But it’s her face that will stay with me forever. Her eyes were screaming for help, but she could barely make a sound. Her face told the story of the unspeakable tragedy we were witnessing. A child abandoned. Left to die. Alone.

My eyes travelled from the screen to the bassinet in the corner of our lounge room. Our son, Jackson, lay there sleeping soundly. The contrast was stark. Chilling. Jackson was six months old, our first baby, one of the first grandchildren for our parents, and the first baby in our group of friends. Everywhere we went, there was a line-up of loved ones waiting for their turn to hold him. He was showered in love. As all children should be.

I turned back to the TV. The dying baby had been left alone for days, with an older child sent in every so often to see if she was still alive. Eventually, and painfully, she passed away.

It was right then that we decided to do something. It was one of those moments where you know the course of your life is about to change. We couldn’t live with what we just saw. We couldn’t carry on as if we hadn’t seen it. Something stirred in us, and we decided there and then that we would pursue adoption.

It seemed like a simple enough idea. Surely there was a well-travelled path, where others had come before us. Surely adoption was a valued process, where parentless children were matched to loving families. We all knew the statistics—there were millions of orphaned children around the world in need of a home. Surely matching these children to a family would be a top priority for governments around the world. It couldn’t be that difficult to bring the two together. Could it?

As we began to research, we deflated a little, and our naivety revealed itself.

We read some concerning stories about international adoption from Australia—stories of long waiting lists, slow processing, and red tape. But as we began the process for international adoption, we expected to find ourselves in a world of people like us, people who had a heart for abandoned children, who understood the obstacles but were willing to persist through it all. What we found instead was largely a world of hostility, suspicion, coldness, and negativity. Adoption itself didn’t seem to be valued, and the children in need of a home didn’t seem to be the focus. It was quite a shock, and we struggled to adjust.

We pushed on, attended two weekends of training sessions, and prepared anxiously for our first assessment interview. Being assessed for adoption is a nerve-wracking process. Our whole existence was being evaluated, like bugs under a microscope. We had to prove ourselves over and over, and not in the ways we expected.

We were already parents. Our