Haitian boy, 4, arrives at new home in Eugene

By Anne Williams

Alicia Swaringen stepped off a plane in Eugene Thursday afternoon with precious cargo indeed: her new Haitian son, Sthainder.

The 48-year-old massage therapist and counselor had been on tenterhooks since a massive earthquake struck Haiti on Jan. 12, wondering whether her long-planned adoption of the boy would be stymied by the chaos and loss of paperwork.

Instead, it was expedited. On Monday, she got word from the adoption agency, Eugene-based Holt International Children’s Services, to fly to Miami as quickly as possible to pick up the 4-year-old boy with whom she had bonded instantly when they met last spring.

“He’s doing incredible,” Swaringen said from home Thursday — though she said the language barrier is a bit of a challenge. She had invited over a friend who speaks Creole, she said, “so we can understand what he’s been saying to us all this time.”

Other than seeming frightened by loud noises — probably a response to the trauma of the earthquake — Sthainder held up well during the long journey, his mother said, and seems happy and healthy.

The boy flew to Miami on a military transport with 13 other Haitian orphans whose adoptions were expedited in the wake of the temblor, said Susan Soonkeum Cox, Holt’s vice president for policy and external affairs.

All are between the ages of 3 and 9, she said, and lived at Holt’s Fontana Village orphanage, about 30 miles north of Port-au-Prince. None of the orphanage’s children were injured in the earthquake.

Seven others will leave Haiti for the United States soon, she said.

“I have to say the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security have done an amazing job,” Cox said of the effort to speed up adoptions. “They’ve had people working in 24-hour shifts.”

Holt sent three Eugene staff members to the orphanage to assist with the departure, she said; two accompanied the children who arrived this week, and the third will return with the next group.

“While they were happy and knew they were going to be adopted, that was still an uncertain, new experience for them to be on an airplane,” she said.