Children are the mission

By Greg Mellen

LONG BEACH - At the age of 8 or 9, Hemlata Momaya remembers seeing "Boot Polish," a Hindi movie in her native India.

She didn't know it at that time, but the Raj Kapoor movie about orphaned and poverty-stricken children would end up shaping much of her adult life.

"I still cry when I see the movie," Hemlata says, at her desk in the modest Long Beach offices of Bal Jagat: Children's World Inc., the nonprofit adoption agency Hemlata runs with her daughter, Mausami Momaya.

The eldest child of a stockbroker in an upper-middle-class family, Hemlata was stunned by the movie and its depictions of poverty and the lives of orphans.

"I was young, and it taught me so much," Hemlata recalls. "It was the first movie to inspire me to help others."

The young Hemlata pestered her father with difficult questions about the lives of the poor and about helping others.

Although dad was able to put her off by saying "we'll talk about it when you get older," Hemlata never forgot that movie or its lessons.

After earning a master's degree in social work at the University of Bombay and volunteering at places that served disabled and disadvantaged children, Hemlata met and married Lal, her husband of 36 years.

The couple immigrated to the United States and began a family with two children. But the thirtysomething mom couldn't forget her life's mission.

In 1983, after a yearlong battle with California bureaucrats, Hemlata opened one of the state's first privately run international adoption agencies.

Today, 25 years later, having placed between 3,000 and 4,000 foreign babies with Southern California families, Hemlata is still going strong.

Wall space in the three-room office is dominated by framed collages of the faces of children who have found homes through the agency.

Brown children, white children and every shade in between. Children from India and China, Vietnam and Thailand. From Romania, Russia and Moldova. Kids from Ethiopia, Ecuador and Guatemala.

And there are hundreds more pictures that won't fit on the limited wall space.

Many of the pictures are of single children, many more are of groups of three and four who were adopted by the same families.

"Most people are so happy they'll do it again, though we say they have to wait for a year," Mausami says.

While it took Hemlata until adulthood to fulfill her calling, Mausami was raised into the work.

For almost as long as the 32-year-old can remember, her mother has taken her on trips to orphanages around the world.

Mausami says she officially entered the adoption business in 2001, after graduating from Cal State Long Beach and becoming a licensed clinical social worker. Realistically, she says, it has been a lifelong endeavor.

"Every summer vacation she'd pack us up," Mausami said, referring to herself and her older brother, Larry. "We went to orphanages our whole life."

Bal Jagat, which means children's world in Hindi, does only international adoptions and takes only healthy children from orphanages.

The agency does not make arrangements with independent lawyers or birth-parents in foreign countries.

It costs at least $20,000 per adoption, the bulk of which goes to the countries from which the baby comes. Prospective parents must go through home study and counseling with social workers and wait a year or longer for the child.

Hemlata says she meets individually with every prospective parent or couple to gauge their seriousness, commitment and ability to care for a child.

Government officials in the babies' countries select the children for the prospective families. Would-be parents then decide whether to accept the baby before traveling abroad to meet and pick up the child.

Although trafficking of babies and unscrupulous adoption practices have made the news in recent years, Hemlata maintains high standards.

Bal Jagat recently earned accreditation from the Hague Convention on intercountry adoptions, what Mausami calls the "gold standard" of recognition.

President Clinton signed into law the Intercountry Adoption Act in 2000 and the Hague Convention sets norms and procedures to protect children, birth parents and adoptive parents and to prevent trafficking and other abuses.

Hemlata says she began her agency working almost exclusively with immigrant Indian families and babies.

She faced plenty of opposition, first from the state, which made her file reams of paperwork, then officials in the Indian government and, finally, within her own community.

"People would ask `Why do you want to work with throwaway babies like that?"' Hemlata says. "But I had a goal in my heart. I had a calling from somewhere, I don't know."

Since then, Bal Jagat has expanded to work with countries on four continents.

Despite the bureaucracies and hard work it takes to arrange foreign adoptions, Hemlata says there is an unending need.

"My file cabinets are filled with waiting children," says Hemlata, adding that she also has 100 open cases of parents looking or waiting for children.

Through all the adoptions, Hemlata and Mausami say no parent or couple has ever tried to back out of an adoption once they've brought the baby home.

Hemlata admits visiting orphanages and seeing desperate need can be daunting.

When asked if she ever feels overwhelmed, Mausami prefers to look at the possibilities - both for the child and parents who often have been unable to have children of their own for a variety of reasons.

International rules toughened It's a personal calling

"We feel lucky that we can do this," she says. "You see a child, and it's a human life and there's so much potential there. (Later) you see kids in high school and college, and you know where they came from as a 3- or 4-pound child and you're a part of that life. It's very personal to us."