This is the story of my life so far: 68 years and counting.
Prequel: A Brief History of my Family in France
The story starts here
Previous episode: Part 73
Looking for children to adopt
In 1985, after more than 5 years of marriage, Geneviève had never been pregnant. So, we decided to adopt children.
My mother, who really likes children, thought that it was a very good idea.
In France at this time, in each of the 95 "départements", adoption was the domain of the DDASS: Direction Départementale des Affaires Sanitaires et Sociales (Departmental Direction of Sanitary and Social Affairs).
So, we wrote dozens of letters to many DDASS. We did not received many answers, and those that we received were negative or at least not very encouraging.
The truth is that, in France, there were more parents that wanted to adopt than children that were "adoptable".
So, we also contacted several organizations that were facilitating international adoption.
As I remember, the two countries that were sending many children abroad to be adopted were Columbia and South Korea. This is probably no longer the case.
We got some promising responses. One of them was from a small Belgian outfit that were facilitating adoptions of children from Haiti. The woman that lead this organization asked us to come visit them.
So, we went to Belgium. The couple had 22 children, 5 biological and 17 adopted.
The older children were helping the parents to raise the younger children.
They wanted to see us, to check if we were this kind of parents that want to adopt because it is the right thing to do, but have no real interest in raising children. We assured them that we were not such parents.
And several weeks later, they told us that they had two sisters coming from Haiti that we could adopt. Were we still interested? Of course, we said yes.
Continue to Part 75
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Summary
Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8
Part 9 - Part 10 - Part 11 - Part 12 - Part 13 - Part 14 - Part 15 - Part 16
Part 17 - Part 18 - Part 19 - Part 20 - Part 21 - Part 22 - Part 23 - Part 24
Part 25 - Part 26 - Part 27 - Part 28 - Part 29 - Part 30 - Part 31 - Part 32
Part 33 - Part 34 - Part 35 - Part 36 - Part 37 - Part 38 - Part 39 - Part 40
Part 41 - Part 42 - Part 43 - Part 44 - Part 45 - Part 46 - Part 47 - Part 48
Part 49 - Part 50 - Part 51 - Part 52 - Part 53 - Part 54 - Part 55 - Part 56
Part 57 - Part 58 - Part 59 - Part 60 - Part 61 - Part 62 - Part 63 - Part 64
Part 65 - Part 66 - Part 67 - Part 68 - Part 69 - Part 70 - Part 71 - Part 72
Part 73
