The Adoption Story Part 2: Finding resilience under the threat of gunfire

When we arrived in Peru in early January of 1990 to adopt our daughter, Lima was a city under siege.  We knew before leaving that we would be spending the next two months in Peru.  But we really didn’t know how difficult it would be for two Americans who had never lived in a war zone.  And in the process of surviving we would have to figure out how to take care of a 3-month-old child.

We met our daughter in the late afternoon.  Because of concerns about security, we cut our visit with her foster parents short and headed back to the hotel.  We were immediately aware that things were crazier than they had been when we had left the city earlier in the morning.  Our interpreter told us that the Minister of Defense had been assassinated near our hotel.   The young soldiers that we met every few miles at checkpoints appeared frightened.  When we got back to the hotel, the National Police were waiting for me.  They were interviewing every male who had entered the country in the last 24 hours.  They were especially interested in me since I was an American and wore a prosthetic hook.  The young officer who interrogated me kept asking me if I had lost my hand through explosives.  Finally, after what seemed a very long time, he appeared satisfied that I was not a terrorist.  That was the first of a number of interactions we would have with police, including Interpol.  Peru, then and now, takes the adoption of their children out of country very seriously.

The main challenge, however, that evening was beginning to care for a 3-month-old on the third floor of a hotel with no electric power during the day and with water that was unsafe to be used in any way without boiling.  (The water district employees were on strike and had been for months.)

The currency had been inflated in Peru to being almost worthless.  Thankfully, we had brought a lot of what we would need.

And then there were the bombings and the gunfire at night.  The third night we were there, a bomb went off in the plaza outside our hotel.  The lights went out and we placed our daughter on the floor between us and covered her with our bodies.  That night, the “Shining Path” blew up the barracks for the U.S. Embassy Marine Guards and took the power out for most of  Mera Flores, the suburb of Lima where we were staying.

So what kept us going in those two months?  One of the main things was a Peruvian family of about the same age who decided, for whatever reasons, to befriend us.  And, of course, we had a very strong reason.  Our purpose for being there.  Our daughter.

As for our own skills and attitudes, we were and are both optimists and were confident that together we could handle what might come, which is helpful when you have two or three bouts of dysentery.  And we  kept our sense of humor.

My wife and I had disagreed about the level of risk we would be taking when we went to Peru.  I had talked a few months before we left with a pilot who had flown in the jungles of Peru and had told me that a major Shining Path offensive in Lima was planned for January.  My wife had discounted this and accepted what the agency had said, that all would be fine.  The night of the bombing in the plaza as we lay on the floor with a firefight going on outside our window, I turned to my wife and said, “Told you so.”  We both laughed.  What else could we do?

To make a long story short, we survived, through our efforts and through the support that we received from our friends in Peru, from the staff at the hotel and the adoption agency.  Our daughter has grown to be a fine young woman, and at 24 she decided she was ready to go back to Peru to meet her biological mother and older sisters.  Our old friends were delighted to hear that we were coming.  The new Peru had changed, but we were not prepared for how much it had changed. We will discuss these changes in the next blog.

 Ron Breazeale