Ahren Christopher

Every day I wonder if we will ever bring Ahren home. How old he will be. How long will we have to wait. Will it ever truly happen. People say to me, Oh don't give up. It will happen. He will come home. But reality says this is unlikely to happen. Let me tell you why:

It is illegal to pay a woman to give up her baby. In international adoptions, it is up to the US Embassy and INS to enforce that. If a woman gives up more than one or two children, red flags go up and investigations begin. It is hard to believe that women would be so poverty stricken and desperate that they would turn to this income source, but think about it. If the children you already had were starving to death and the one way you had to make enough money to feed them for a year was to get pregnant and hand over the child to adoption wouldn't you be tempted? You would be told that the baby would go to an American couple who would give it every thing the baby could ever desire, plus a future full of promise, great medical and dental care, education, everything that is not available to most children in rural Guatemala. What would you think then? I don't know for sure if this happens but I can imagine it does.

Now, when the news station did the undercover story on Ahren's agency, they have the owners on film discussing how they pay the birth mothers. They discuss it in detail, how they receive so much at this point and so much at the next point. This got the attention of INS and the US Embassy. They have announced that they will be doing an extra in-depth investigation of every Waiting Angels agency case. This would not be a problem if the case was squeaky clean and no red flags but....

Ahren is the 11th child of the birth mother

She has given up multiple other children

The Facilitator is already under investigation for illegal adoption practices in Guatemala

The whole issue with his birth certificate was suspicious from day 1

If the US government determines that the birth mother was probably paid for giving up Ahren, he will never be able to be adopted into the US, no matter what. Not by us, not by anyone. What will happen to him? I don't know. We are trying to put a safety net in place so that we can move him to the orphanage of some friends and we will pay for him to live there until he is an adult. We can only do that if the facilitator in Guat cooperates with us, and so far he is not too willing to even talk much with us.

We are not giving up. We won't give up until we have absolutely no avenue to attempt. No hope what-so-ever, no place else to turn. His very life depends on us. Poor little soul, caught in such an ugly mess. He is just an innocent little angel.