Kiwanis-Carmi Times Article

This article was in my hometown paper. I will try to post the slide show soon.


Little girl from Guatemala completes Douthitt family

By Barry Cleveland
Carmi Times
Fri Aug 15, 2008, 04:16 PM CDT

"Paper pregnancies" can go on for years.
But 364 days after Jeff and Sharon Douthitt and their three children decided to add a daughter to the family, AnnaMaria Rosario Douthitt came home to the U.S. for the first time.
Sharon (Gates) Douthitt was the guest speaker at Thursday's weekly luncheon meeting of the Kiwanis Club of Carmi, held at The Hickory Stick. The Carmi native showed slides of the family-before and after AnnaMaria joined it-and answered questions from her audience.
She also posed for a photograph with her youngest daughter and sat down with a Times reporter for an interview to provide more detail.
Jeff (also a Carmi native) and Sharon were married Aug. 15, 1987 in Carmi. They eventually moved to Paducah, Ky., established a business (about which they spoke at a prior Kiwanis meeting) and parented three children.
"We were happy," Douthitt said. "But something was missing." Claire (now 14, who has a twin brother, Ollie) and Lily (now 12) decided that they needed a baby sister.
The family talked it over, prayed about it and decided, on Aug. 1, 2006, to act.
Douthitt said the family was acquainted with another American family which had adopted two little Guatemalan girls, and their experience was positive. That family referred the Douthitts to the Florida-based agency they had worked with. "We didn't look anywhere else," Douthitt said.
AnnaMaria was born Oct. 20, 2006 to a single mother of four other children in a coastal village in Guatemala. The 41-year-old mother, a divorced housekeeper, simply couldn't afford another child. And so she placed AnnaMaria in foster care and made her available for adoption.
Her photograph was posted on the agency's website, and while it was a bit fuzzy, the child's name caught their eye, Douthitt said. The Douthitts completed the necessary paperwork by Christmas 2006 and were officially "matched" with AnnaMaria the next month.
In February 2007, the entire family flew to Guatemala. AnnaMaria was in foster care in Guatemala City, the Central American nation's capital and largest city. The Douthitts spent a week there. They met the child's foster mother, and they got to keep the baby with them for a week. "Then we came home," Douthitt said.
Approval of the adoption by agencies in both Guatemala and the U.S. took a lot of time-and a lot of paperwork. In the meantime, the Douthitts flew down to Guatemala again and spent Holy Week 2007 there, this time in the city of Antigua. Many of Douthitt's color slides showed scenes from that ancient city, including the Holy Week parades, markets, products (such as coffee and macadamia nuts) and the people.
While there, Claire took Spanish lessons for a week. And that started something. She'll be a freshman in high school this fall and will take her third year of Spanish lessons, her mother said, adding that her daughter may have found her career at an early age.
Claire and Sharon flew back to Guatemala on June 1, 2007. Claire resumed her Spanish lessons, and Sharon completed the process of adoption. They flew home July 31, 2007-364 days after the family had decided to add a member.
Douthitt said many Guatemalans are of small stature and have a delayed physical development, in part because the babies are often carried for a long time by their mothers. AnnaMaria couldn't sit up by herself at the age of 7 months, she said, but she is perfectly normal now and can walk. She doesn't say much, but her mother believes that's as much a reflection of the "laid-back" nature of the Guatemalan people as discomfort with English.
Her new siblings have taken to her.
And the parents?
Douthitt compared it to having a second or third child.
"You don't know if you're going to love them as much as you love your first child-but you do!" she said.
Douthitt and her mother-Kiwanian Janice Gates, the program chairman for August-shared other stories and impressions of Guatemala (Janice and Richard have also visited the country), which is known as the "land of eternal spring."
"We have a million adoption stories and Guatemala stories," Douthitt said.
And in response to questions from Kiwanians, she shared some of her impressions. Guatemala is a Spanish-speaking, primarily Roman Catholic (with Mayan influence) country, though the Protestant church is growing, she said. While there, they often ate at local restaurants; food was inexpensive, and there was quite a variety of ethnic cuisines available.
She said armed guards are posted outside many businesses (though she wasn't sure why).
And she said that an NBC Dateline report that indicated there was widespread corruption in the Guatemalan adoption process did not reflect the Douthitts' experience (AnnaMaria actually appeared twice in the report, she added).
Several other Gates family members were present at the meeting, including Sharon's sister, Sandra Bryant of Carmi, who (with husband Brian) has also traveled overseas in a successful quest to adopt a child.