Back in 1983, my wife and I were watching a television news program on Sunday morning, waiting for our two boys to get ready for church. Little did we know that 15 minutes in front of the television would change our lives forever.
The news program dealt with the growing number of children made orphans in El Salvador as that country’s civil war continued on between the “have’s” and the “have not’s”. Having spent several unsuccessful years trying to adopt in this country, and being turned away since we already had two biological children; we both turned to each other and said simultaneously, “We should adopt a little girl from El Salvador!”
Two weeks later, we were having drapes installed in our family room…the television was on and Phil Donahue was discussing the huge controversy of the time; Cabbage Patch Kids came with adoption papers. Adoption advocates thought it demeaned the whole adoption process. To those sensitive to the world of adoption, it was a big deal at the time…to the vast majority of you reading this, you are left scratching you heads saying, “Whaaaat?” Anyways, the drapery installer asks my wife if he can sit down and watch the show for a minute or two, since he and his wife had just adopted a little boy from…drum roll, please…long pause for dramatic effect…El Salvador.
The older I get the more I see the hand of God at work in everything. Many may think it is delusional thinking on my part. To me, I don’t see random in either of those two events, and the longer this story goes on, the more I see that God had a plan that went way beyond my wife and me adopting a little girl from El Salvador. I believe that, if you start out to do some good in this world, God will provide fertile soil in which to plant your seeds of kindness.
That is very long-winded preamble to what I am about to tell you, but it is vital that you understand my perspective on things before we move on to talk about Gina’s story. I wrote a series of posts on Active Rain from 2/22/12-3/27/12 chronicling the entire adventure. Hold on to this little fact about me posting Gina’s story back in 2012. I am going to try as best I can to give you a synopsis; because what is important is not the story…but its continuing aftermath.
So, here is the abbreviated version. As I said above, my wife and I adopted Gina when she was 6-years old during the height of the El Salvadorian civil war in which over 50,000 people were killed. Gina had been injured and couldn’t walk. She was living in a state run orphanage when we adopted her. We had been told that her family had been killed, but as Gina grew older and her English improved; she began to voice her concerns that her parents were not dead... that they were very much alive.
As time passed, this chasm between us and Gina over the fate of her parents only widened, until she started to run away on a regular basis as a teenager. Gina eventually ended up in foster care. At one of the lowest points in our married lives, my wife and I looked at our adopting Gina as a complete failure.
Then one day, out of the blue in 1997, my wife received a phone call from a doctor in Chicago asking if we had adopted a little girl from El Salvador. That started a whole chain of events which could only be described as a miracle.
That phone call led to us finding out that Gina’s parents were very much alive and had been looking for her the past 12 years. Gina had been kidnapped by the Salvadorian military, had her name and records changed, and had been put up for adoption. A group in El Salvador, led by a Catholic priest, had been piecing together the story of these “disappeared children”, and there were over 2,000 children who had been taken from their families. Gina was the 22nd child found, and the first adopted by a family in America.
The story was covered by CBS “60 Minutes”, “The New York Times”, “The Boston Globe”, “Good Housekeeping”, and dozens of other media outlets. If you Google, Gina Craig War Orphan; you will come up with quite a few stories related to what happened twenty-five years ago.
With the help of “60 Minutes”, Gina was reunited with her parents. Gina's biological parents told her that my wife and I were not to blame for what happened. They told her that we were very much victims, just like them, to a government that used these kidnappings as a form of intimidation to keep its citizenry in line. The kindness and generosity of Gina’s parents that day cut through the years of painful scars and helped to remove years of resentment…perhaps even hatred towards us. Perhaps the words spoken that day have come to make this one of my favorite Psalms. “If today you hear God’s voice, harden not your heart”: Psalm 95.
Gina returned to the United States and is now married and has three kids. They live about an hour above New York City. We don’t get to visit as much as we would like, but we are closer now than when she was in the next bedroom over from ours growing up . We recently had an opportunity to visit with Gina’s biological sister’s family, many whom live nearby her in New York. We sat and talked about all the things that had happened to our two families, and we discovered that we all share a bond and a love for each other; despite starting out our lives thousands of miles apart. As for Gina’s biological father…he now works for the very organization that found his daughter. It has come full circle. He is helping to reunite other “disappeared children.
I recently received a comment to one of the ActiveRain posts I did back in 2012 on Gina’s story. It was from a man who had been adopted as a little boy from El Salvador. He was asking about the orphanage that Gina came from. I called Gina to tell her about this man contacting me through ActiveRain. Gina laughed, and said to me, “Dad, I keep forgetting to tell you…but 3 people have contacted me too.”
She then went on to explain that one man is in the US military and Gina’s biological father has been able to help the man find his family in El Salvador through DNA testing. Another woman is just beginning to search for her family and Gina is helping her translate her paperwork into Spanish.
So, there you have it…sometimes you just have to stand back and admire God’s handiwork. It is truly something to behold!
Comments(34)