Me, my girls and God’s plan: Vanessa Neumann on adoption and finding her children in Colombia

‘Adoption is the purest expression of love,” said our driver, as he whisked me and the two girls of whom I had taken conditional custody from Bogotá’s elite Club Nogal to the offices of ICBF, Colombia’s family  welfare agency. As a consequence of Colombia’s civil war roiling officially since 1964 (but unofficially since 1946), the Colombian Institute for Family Welfare (ICBF) is the country’s second best-funded ministry, after Defence. “God will bless you for this, ma’am,” he concluded.

I demurred, with some response about it being my blessing. More recently I have thought: “Gosh, I certainly hope so.” Nothing about the adoption journey has been easy – and it’s been a very long journey that in some ways is only just beginning.

I have wanted to be a mother for as long as I can remember. I strove for motherhood through an escalating arms race of assisted pregnancy and fertility options. As the treatments became more harrowing, painful, expensive and intrusive, I sometimes got a positive blood-test result, only to find out later I had miscarried. Being a mother was all I wanted. I felt forsaken by God, but I clung to hope over all reason.

For the next three years I rented homes (both in Washington, DC, and in London) with a spare bedroom, in case a child might come into my life. In late 2020 I decided to resign from my position as Venezuelan ambassador in London, in part to get back to the US and adopt. While most prospective parents choose an adoption agency and then get a menu of source countries for children, my process was backwards.

I wanted to adopt from my native Venezuela, but couldn’t because I am persecuted by the dictatorship. Those I asked to go to Venezuelan government offices and access my personal files unequivocally refused on the basis that simply mentioning my name would get them arrested and tortured to death. I turned to Col-ombia, the neighbouring country that I knew well and loved, and had also been a great ally in the struggle for democracy in Venezuela.

I first travelled to Colombia at the invitation of then-President Álvaro Uribe to observe and assess the reintegration of members of paramilitary and terrorist groups all around the country. This entailed working with children who had been both victims and perpetrators of the brutal conflict: some with missing limbs; all with broken hearts and shattered minds. Adopting from Colombia therefore made sense to me: I would understand the context from which my children came. I started making inquiries about orphanages. I quickly found one through a Venezuelan friend. “Don’t worry, Vanessa, you will be a mother,” she reassured me on our initial video call. I sobbed.

What followed was a brutal two years of background checks, psychological tests and per-sonality evaluations (by both machines and psychologists), several rounds of FBI fingerprinting and personal recommendations. After my dossier was approved by both the US Dep-artment of Homeland Security and the Colombia committee, which is a public-private partnership of the orphanage and the ICBF, I got “matched” with two sisters, outside the range of ages I was considering: 3 and 11.

I needed to apply for expanded permission from the US Department of Homeland Security. When that was granted, I got their files and wept upon reading them. I wrote back to the Colombia committee: “I will take them.” As an educated woman with strong resolve and a reputation as a human-rights leader in Latin America, I thought I could help them in an understanding and loving home. It’s been rather different from what I expected, forcing me to reach into corners of my soul for compassion and resilience I didn’t know were there.

First, adopted children, particularly the older ones, do not automatically love you; no, they are not necessarily grateful. Those who still remember their birth parents, particularly if one of them is still alive, craft the narrative that you have whisked them away from an otherwise happy childhood. You give love, mentoring, more love, cooked meals, hugs, even more love, a safe place to play, new activities they enjoy, yet more love – and you get sullenness and stories about how you are cold and not understanding.

It is far easier for adopted children to esc-ape into revisionist history and fantasy relationships, opening pathways that can easily be exploited by predators: a parent’s worst nightmare. As the adult, you must stay in quiet and loving resolve, until they settle into an acceptance and a love of their new family life.

Secondly, adoptees are called “jigsaw kids” because, unlike one’s natural born-and-raised children, their development trajectory is like the disconnected patchwork of an incomplete jigsaw puzzle. On the one hand, the adopted child can be highly sophisticated and go out into the street, find food and protect a younger sibling from a sexual predator. On the other hand they may have limited language skills, zero understanding of how the world works, and the needs of a toddler: to be read to at night and tucked into bed with a prayer.

“As I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” While I await the baptism of my two beautiful girls at St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York this spring, that is is the little ditty I have taught them both to give them comfort and improve their English and to encourage their faith, while we continue to progress as a family.

Adoption is indeed the ultimate expression of love, not because of how it starts, but because of how it carries on and builds. I gave my older child the middle name Sophia – wisdom – the mother of Faith, Hope and Love. I have explained to her, perhaps in overly didactic terms (a professional hazard for a former philosophy professor like me) that in Catholicism, and in fact in many religions, wisdom is at the root of all the other virtues of love and compassion, and hope and faith. I have told her I gave her the name Sophia because she is in fact the wise one. I’m not entirely sure she yet believes that, but I hope she will.

In the meantime, I am the one who is truly gaining wisdom and an ever-deeper love and faith and hope. I have had to dig deep into myself to find those pockets of virtue and res-ilience within my soul and within my heart. That has been for me the ultimate revelation of God’s plan and, perhaps in a small way, some godliness within me. While our adoption and adaptation process brings me closer to my new daughters, it has also brought me closer to Him – and that is yet another blessing from my beautiful children.

Dr Vanessa Neumann is a former Venezuelan ambassador to the Court of St James. She is the author of Blood Profits (Macmillan) and spokesperson for Democratic Governance in South America for the IX Summit of the Americas.

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