Latina Cinderella : Adoption: A little girl finds herself transported from the squalor of an Ecuadorean orphanage to a new life with an Encino family.

A 9-year-old street urchin sleeps in a crib in an orphanage in Ecuador with nothing to look forward to in her life except working as a maid, begging on the streets, or worse.

One day, a beautiful young woman takes a spur-of-the-moment tour of the orphanage, becomes entranced by the charming little girl and takes her away, to another life, another world. The girl is plopped into a whirlwind of Hollywood movie stars, designer clothes, her own room, her own cat, her own dog, a brother, a nanny--everything she could possibly dream of.

Sounds like a fairy tale, or perhaps a Shirley Temple movie? Well, it is reality for SaraJane, a girl adopted just before Christmas by Elizabeth and Tommy Cook of Encino.

Nicknamed the “Latina Cinderella” by newspapers in her homeland, SaraJane now lives with a family she has trouble speaking to and plays in a back yard with a 50-foot swimming pool, swing set and walk-in dollhouse.

Quietly to herself, she wonders when this dream will end.

“It’s a dream that has come true for all of us,” said the proud new mother, Elizabeth Cook. “We are so lucky.”

Getting SaraJane out of the South American country was an arduous task of bureaucratic red tape and nail-biting waiting periods. After spending more than $20,000, the Cooks completed the first successful adoption from Ecuador in more than two years.

Because of the frustrating procedures the Cooks faced to bring the girl to the United States, the Ecuadorean Consulate in Los Angeles said the process is being streamlined to make adoptions easier, requiring fewer fees and reports.

“There are thousands of beautiful children over there, 40 babies alone in the orphanage where we found Sara,” Elizabeth said. “It breaks my heart to know there are so many children over there who need good homes. We didn’t plan to adopt when we went there, but when we saw Sara, we knew she was ours. It was magic.”

Elizabeth and Tommy Cook would have a difficult time adopting a child in the United States because of their ages. Elizabeth is 28; Tommy is 61.

They met and fell in love 10 years ago when Elizabeth was playing on her high school tennis team. Tommy, a former child actor, is a noted impresario for charity sports events and a tennis pro.

“When we met he told me he was a regular on ‘Blondie’ and the original Little Beaver on ‘Red Ryder,’ and I had no idea what he was talking about because all that was way before I was born,” said Elizabeth, a graduate of the Pepperdine University School of Law.

Tommy performed in more than 3,000 radio shows, and was the voice of Junior on “The Life of Riley.” He acted in films such as “The Vicious Years,” “Night Passage,” “Battle Cry” and “Tarzan and the Leopard Woman.” Later, he wrote the Sensurround film “Rollercoaster” and scripted the tennis story for the Ali MacGraw film “Players.”

Today, Tommy is creator of the “Challenge of the Sexes” and has organized more than 200 events in such exotic places as Monte Carlo, Bombay, India, and Kauai, Hawaii. He takes along celebrities such as Charlton Heston, Merv Griffin, Bill Cosby, John Forsythe, Stefanie Powers and Roger Moore, who help raise money for charities ranging from cerebral palsy to the Mother Teresa foundation. He has coordinated the Michael Landon celebrity tennis tournament.

Last May, Tommy took Kristy McNichol, Mimi Rogers, Joseph Bologna and Erik Estrada to Guayaquil, Ecuador, for the Pancho Segura Tennis Tournament and his wife, Elizabeth, decided to go, too.

He and Elizabeth have one son, Mikhael, 6, who always wanted an older sibling. They never seriously discussed adoption, though, knowing the obstacles they would face.

Elizabeth was staying with Augustine Fabres-Cordero, the nephew of the former Ecuadorean president, and while on an impromptu tour of Guayaquil, they stopped at the Fundacion Para la Adopcion de Nuestros Ninas (FANN), a private orphanage in Ecuador. Elizabeth says she cringed when she saw all the poor abandoned children, almost all younger than 3.

When she entered a room with 15 children, Elizabeth was transfixed as she watched a 9-year-old girl helping a nurse feed and change babies. One worker explained that the girl was left at the orphanage when she was 4. Because of her age, no one had ever wanted to adopt her, and she probably wouldn’t be able to stay much longer. Elizabeth’s heart leaped.

“That’s my daughter,” Elizabeth said, surprising even herself.

The girl’s face brightened when she saw Elizabeth. She approached and said in Spanish, “I have been praying for you. You are my mother.”

A stunned Elizabeth tried to respond, using her limited Spanish.

“Mommy, you are so beautiful,” the girl answered.

They stared at each other for a moment. Elizabeth ran her fingers through the girl’s brown hair and noticed a scar on her forehead--a scar the girl had when she came to the orphanage and still refuses to discuss. They hugged. Elizabeth knew she had a daughter.

Back at the hotel, Elizabeth had a hard time breaking the news to Tommy.

“I thought this was another harebrained idea by Elizabeth,” Tommy said with a sigh. “Having another child was the farthest thing from my mind. But she insisted this girl was meant to be our daughter, and somehow I knew she was right.”

Tommy doesn’t consider himself religious, but he flushes and gets choked up when he talks about the spiritual bond he felt when he first met SaraJane. Although she never has had a male role model, SaraJane had no hesitation approaching him, as Elizabeth had feared she might.

SaraJane said, “I prayed to God for a mother and father like you, and God answered my prayers.”

Tommy was instantly sold. “She jumped into my arms the moment she saw me,” he said. “We spent the day at the beach. She was Daddy’s little girl ever since.”

That was just the beginning. The first steps required dozens of documents and thousands of dollars of permits, licenses and reports. Every step along the way could have resulted in a “no” that would have halted the adoption. They were required to produce fingerprints of the whole family, personal references, medical records, an FBI clearance, and birth and marriage certificates. They needed to get letters from their bank attesting to their financial solvency, provide evidence that there was no record of criminal history and undergo a social worker’s home study report. They also provided a letter of recommendation from Drew Amerson, an assistant California attorney general, for whom Elizabeth once work as a law clerk.

Marta Salgado of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service helped them get the proper fingerprint records and background checks. Ruthie Spiegel, a private social worker, spent days analyzing their household and wrote a glowing family evaluation. Spiegel’s two daughters eventually befriended SaraJane.

The Cooks had to go through an agency in Alabama, the only one authorized by the Ecuadorean government to handle international adoptions. In the process, they met a family from Michigan who had been trying for years to adopt a child from Ecuador. The Cooks returned to Los Angeles to get paperwork done while the girl stayed at the orphanage. They called her almost daily.

What might have taken another family two or three years of legal wrangling, the persistent Cooks pushed through in six months.

“I dropped everything. All I could do was think about getting her home,” Elizabeth said. “I was having dreams about her. I heard her crying in my nightmares. I tried to get to her and I couldn’t. I woke up in tears.”

Tommy faxed SaraJane letters and pictures drawn by her new brother, but she couldn’t understand why she was still stuck in the orphanage.

Elizabeth took forms to the local Ecuadorean Consulate where documents could take six months to process. Assistant Consul Maria Antonieta Paez heard the urgency in Elizabeth’s voice and prepared the papers in 10 minutes.

“She seemed so concerned, we wanted to help her. I could tell she would be a good mother,” said Paez, who works for Consul Patricio Baca and hasn’t had an adoption case come through her office in six years. “It’s been a long time because we don’t want to seem like we’re exporting poor children from Ecuador. There is concern for the children.”

Visiting SaraJane at her new Valley home a week after her arrival, Paez ruffled the hair of the dark-eyed girl and said: “Now she can become whatever she wants. By the time she was 12 or 14 in Ecuador, she would probably have become a maid.”

Paez added: “The worst situation is that she would have become a prostitute. She has such a nice face.”

The Ecuadorean consul is now simplifying adoption procedures for the thousands of children available in government and private orphanages. “They make poor children here look like millionaires, but they are healthy,” Paez said.

To complicate matters, the girl wanted a different name because she didn’t like the one she had. Tommy and Elizabeth chose SaraJane--in part after Tommy’s 91-year-old mother, Fern Jane Cook--and the child liked it. They asked that her former name not be used in print or spoken around the house so that it will never be identified with her again. They are afraid SaraJane’s original name might trigger bad memories for her. Changing her name in Ecuador cost $250.

Elizabeth finally went back in November to bring their new daughter home, but the return from Ecuador was delayed two weeks because the girl’s old middle name was spelled wrong on birth records. “If one stamp is backward, everything can be voided,” Elizabeth said. “I didn’t know I had it in me to get through this, but it was certainly worth it.”

The Latin press picked up the adoption story and followed her to their five-star hotel where the staff catered to the little princess, and she rode around in a limousine. When SaraJane left the orphanage for the last time, she mimicked something she learned from her suave and sophisticated new mother. She turned to the other orphans, waved and shouted, “Ciao!”

On the flight home, stomach cramps made Elizabeth seriously ill and she was rushed to a hospital for food poisoning as soon as they landed in Miami. Elizabeth’s grandmother, Dorothy Saret, lived there and came to help. SaraJane was protective of her ailing mother, “acting as if she were 20 years old and suspicious of anyone who came near me,” Elizabeth said.

“SaraJane had so much responsibility at the orphanage she didn’t know how to be 9 years old, she didn’t know how to have fun,” Elizabeth said.

The girl’s first week in Los Angeles was a kaleidoscope of new experiences. She picked out her first Christmas tree, she saw her first movie--”Hook”--she went to Disneyland, she went horseback riding, she met her dog, Bella, her cat, Mickey, and chose her own bicycle.

While having her first manicure during her first trip to the beauty parlor, she said, “Make me beautiful like my Mommy.” She got a new wardrobe from Bloomingdale’s, Saks Fifth Avenue and Fred Segal. At a Hollywood party, Sylvester Stallone’s mother complimented SaraJane’s beauty and poise. The Cooks’ friends confided to them, “You’ve done something we’ve always dreamed of doing.”

The whole time, SaraJane thought she was in Quito, the capital of Ecuador that she had heard so much about. Tommy used a globe to try to explain they were living in another part of the world.

“She believes she will go back and this will all end someday,” Tommy said. “It’s hard to convince her otherwise.”

SaraJane doesn’t like to hear about visiting Ecuador in May, when she will return with her family for a tennis tournament. And, she is very protective of her little brother.

Mikhael was unsure about his new sister, but they learned to communicate quickly via his video games. “She can play Nintendo better than me, and I’ve been playing since I was 2,” said Mikhael, who attends Viewpoint School in Calabasas.

To ease culture shock, Elizabeth brought meat, popcorn and other food from South America, and the couple hired an Ecuadorean live-in maid. Pia Mendieta has lived five years in Los Angeles, translates for SaraJane and has become part of the family.

“She thinks the rug will be pulled from her at any minute, and it will be all gone,” Mendieta said. “But I think she will settle down soon into her family. She tells me that only a month ago she had no toys.”

Now, SaraJane has a houseful of toys, including a Barbie Doll Dreamhouse and a Cabbage Patch doll with its own adoption papers. She has learned to use the automatic garage door opener, but doesn’t understand that it’s not proper to throw trash out the windows of the family’s red Honda or Toyota Celica convertible.

The only thing SaraJane has asked for so far is cosmetic surgery to remove the scar on her forehead, but she won’t say how she got it. Elizabeth’s mother, retired psychologist Amy Saret of Palo Alto, said the youngster has probably suppressed some traumatic memories and will require some counseling as she adjusts to her new surroundings.

As SaraJane nestles into her new life, Elizabeth is starting a new job at an Encino law firm and is in the process of moving the family to Calabasas, where SaraJane goes to Chaparral Elementary School and is in the English as a second language program. SaraJane is timid about school and clutches her Care Bear lunch box as she tearily kisses her parents goodby each morning. The Cooks eventually want to enroll her in their son’s private school when her skills improve. She reads well, but has no skills in math.

“It’s a big adjustment for her. There’s a boy from Argentina in her class trying to help her,” said Chaparral third-grade teacher Joanne Grimaldi, who speaks no Spanish. “They learn so quickly at this age. In four or five months she’ll speak fluently to them.”

English teacher Kay Dietz, who has 17 non-English-speaking students, has had to teach SaraJane such basic skills as how to use a water fountain. “She is a tough little girl and the other kids are fascinated with her. They think of her as a new toy. But poor Sara is so afraid things will be taken away from her.”

Already, SaraJane, who wears a girl’s size 10, is borrowing her mother’s outfits. “She is so beautiful, with so much potential. What chance did she have otherwise?” her mother said.

Later this month, Mauricio Paez, son of the assistant at the Ecuadorean consul who helped them, and Augustine Fabres-Cordero, who helps produce the Ecuadorean tennis tournament, will be named SaraJane’s godfathers in a Catholic baptism, and Karen Lindekugel, of the Michael Landon Celebrity Tennis Tournament, will fly from Tucson to be her godmother.

Dressed in baggy purple pants, a Reebok shirt and tennis shoes, SaraJane jumps into Tommy’s arms and he groans.

“Sometimes, it’s a lot for an older guy,” Tommy said, as SaraJane pulls off his cap and yanks on his hair. “Hey, I don’t have too much left up there.”

SaraJane, losing her serious self-consciousness, said, “Papa y Mama son muy simpatico. (Papa and Mama are very nice.)” She giggled, showing her dimples, and teased devilishly, “ Y muy gordo . (And very fat.)”

Elizabeth took SaraJane into her arms, gave her a big sloppy kiss and said: “We’re a complete family now. We’re so lucky we found Sara.”

Tommy added, tickling his daughter to get her to laugh, “I think we got her just in time.”