A Special Family Reunion : Parents Celebrate the Peruvian Kids and Culture They’ve Adopted

Her little fingers stained from wolfing down Cheetos, brown-black pigtails whipping in the ocean breeze, Jennifer Gellert has spent the whole day at Bolsa Chica State Beach with 70 or 80 other Peruvian children.

Forget bonding, though. What she really wants is to dump a cup of punch in the gray sand and watch it turn into a purple blob. Her pale Canadian mother, slathered in sun block, keeps a watchful eye on her 3 1/2-year-old, trying to ward off a big mess.

Like Kool-Aid in the sand, the knowledge is just beginning to seep in for Jennifer that she belongs to a larger group, that there are others like her: darkly exotic kids with mostly white moms and dads.

“You don’t just adopt the child, you have to adopt the culture, which is why we’re here,” said Mary-Carol Gellert, 45. “Just like anywhere else, you can’t force friendships on kids. But you can see the connection she makes with the other kids, and it’s really important for her.”

And that is the overriding purpose of this annual national reunion of parents of Peruvian adoptees, this year held over three days in Orange County. The loosely knit group of 750 families is growing, with participants from all over the United States and Canada.

Drawn together by the shared experience of raising children from the impoverished Third World country, the families meet each summer at different locations for a weekend of Peruvian culture, emotional support and friendship.

Several things usually happen, parents say: They swap stories--sometimes nightmares--of their adoption odysseys to Lima; they share insights about the special needs and problems of their foreign-born children, and they offer their successes at diffusing the stigmas common to adoptees of any nationality--as well as those exclusive to mixed-race families. Oh yes, and they have a blast.

This year’s reunion, organized by two Southern California mothers, included a banquet at a Garden Grove Peruvian restaurant, a Disneyland trip and a huge buffet spread across the bluffs of Huntington Beach, where 300 parents and children spent a gorgeous summer day making friends.

“There is a bond between us,” Gellert said simply, “that nobody else can understand.”

The first reunion was four years ago among 17 Iowa families that had either met during their weeks-long adoption process in Peru or met later through word of mouth. Last year about 65 families with adopted Peruvian children met in Kansas City, Mo.

Gathered this year at a hotel near Disneyland, 70 families of about 300 people spent three days together last weekend.

Joan Ruch of Alta Loma and Jan McFarlane of South Pasadena put together this year’s festivities. Ruch and her husband, Ethan, who own a mortgage business in their San Bernardino County community, are the parents of 3-year-old Anneli, whom they adopted in Peru when she was an infant. McFarlane, a former reporter who is now a USC librarian, is the mother of Miguel, 3, a boy she and her husband also adopted in Peru.

Both women share heart-wrenching stories of their adoption experiences in the Peruvian capital of Lima, although they ended happily. For McFarlane, it was having to beg for milk to feed her son because there was nowhere to buy it in a country rocked by out-of-control inflation and traumatized by Marxist terrorists.

“We discovered a country whose capital--once renowned for its beauty and sophistication--had now been brought to its knees by decades of economic and political mismanagement,” she wrote in a gripping article for the newsletter, AdoptNet.

“Indian women with babies tied in shawls on their backs prowled the main thoroughfare of the affluent Lima suburb of Miraflores and held out their hands to beg for their children. I saw a little boy sleeping in a doorway with a cup by his side and a crudely lettered sign in Spanish saying, ‘I’m sick. Please help me.’ ”

Ruch, 39, has two children by her first marriage living with her: a son, 19, and daughter, 16. Unable to give birth to more children after she and Ethan married, they decided to adopt.

Ruch said that her age then--36--seemed to pose a handicap in their efforts at public adoption, and the fact that she was Christian and Ethan was Jewish caused problems with church-based adoption organizations. They heard that Peru was the fastest foreign country from which to adopt a child, so they pursued it.

Because she had given birth twice, she understood what it must mean for a young mother to relinquish a baby.

And that understanding helped soften the pain when the Ruch’s first effort to adopt failed.

Their paperwork completed with the help of an adoption agency, the couple arrived in Lima and almost immediately met their promised new infant and her birth mother, Ava Monica, 19.

“When we arrived at the hotel, we were handed a 6-week-old girl, (and) the birth mother was there also,” recalled Ruch, who is Portuguese-American. “The worst part is that they speak Spanish, and we speak English, and we had an attorney and an interpreter. We communicated, but it would have been nice to be able to speak. . . . We could really feel her loss, and we could really see it.”

The birth mother handed the newborn to the Ruch’s, who named their new baby after Ethan’s late sister, Analisa, who died in a fire at 8. For the next 10 days they ferried her to a nearby medical clinics and attended court proceedings. They couldn’t help but fall in love with her. On their final court date, Ava Monica changed her mind.

Eventually, the Ruchs were able to adopt another little girl. Anneli is a visibly happy child who loves twirling in her skirt and announcing to nobody in particular, “I’m from Peru!”

As is sometimes the case with Peruvian children with mestizo (American Indian-European) roots, Ruch said, her daughter was born with a pigmentation condition that resembles bruising, and she has learned from other parents that it is hereditary.

Issues of identity are common among adopted children, and even more pressing for those whose appearance--often so obviously different from their parents--makes it impossible to deny they are adopted. School friends can tease children about not being wanted by their birth mothers.

A majority of moms and dads such as Ruch said they are not bothered by what others might think as a result of scandal stories about the alleged black-marketing of some Third World babies. And those from Southern California say they don’t feel the stares or rude comments reported by some families in smaller towns whose mixed-color families draw unwanted attention.

Hardly a downer weekend, though; all kinds of positive information is traded among parents, and those with older children can help younger ones avoid the littlest to biggest rough spots: what and when to tell your child about his birth mother, adoption, reckoning with playground taunts and encouraging pride in their heritage.

As with several mothers interviewed, Joan Ruch bristles at the expose broadcast earlier this year on a television news show that she believes grossly miscast parents who adopt Peruvian children as white American vultures spiriting babies from powerless and poor teen mothers.

She notes that the TV show videotaped the group’s picnic last year filled with happy children and parents and never aired a moment of it. She also notes that black-marketing of Third World babies has surely happened, but certainly not to the extent suggested in the TV show. Everybody she knows who has adopted babies in Peru has done it legally, she said, with legitimate attorneys, and having met the birth mother to be sure she wanted to give the foreign parents her baby.

“Our little birth mother was 18,” said Ruch, “and she already had a 2 1/2-year-old son. She had made up her mind (her newborn daughter) was going to go to a great family. She didn’t name her; she said, ‘I want you to name her. She’s your baby now. All I want is for you to love her, to provide for her and not to spank her.’ ”

Many of the parents who met at the reunion stay in contact with the birth mother, writing several times a year and, in some cases, compiling yearly photographic journals of their adoptive child’s progress.

“We want her to know where she came from,” said one father, “and we want the mother to know her child has gone to a good place, for that peace of mind.”

Sitting in beach chairs with their two daughters adopted from Peru, Jill and Naldo Cabanillas of Costa Mesa talked about their joy in the swimsuit-clad little girls beside them. Carrie is 4, Bryn just turned 5.

“Are you from Peru?” Carrie, displaying a squinty grin, sprawled on her father’s lap, asks a visitor. Then she talks about her day at Disneyland with the other children from Peru. The two notable things from the trip were this: “Mickey Mouse wasn’t there,” and “I liked the cars that drive, that go really fast.”

Naldo, 43, was born in Peru, and came to the United States in 1973, when he enrolled at Orange Coast College. While there, he worked as a tutor, which is how he met wife, Jill. She was working for a youth organization and decided to learn Spanish. They married a few years later. He is now a self-employed building planner with architectural training. After a decade of trying to conceive their own children, they decided to adopt, and eventually were led to Peru by a cousin.

There they received Bryn on the day they arrived. She had cerebral palsy and was visually impaired. She now wears glasses to help correct her eyesight. Later that same trip, the couple adopted Carrie.

This is their first national reunion, but last summer they attended a local gathering of parents with Peruvian adoptees, including Ruch and McFarlane.

“We are really happy to find out about this organization,” said Jill Cabanillas, 43, who works as a word processor. “I’m hoping as the years go by that (the girls) will develop friendships here, pen pals even.”

Added Naldo: “They are Americans, but they’ll learn about their culture. I’m not Peruvian-American. I’m American. And that’s how it will be for them too.”