Looking for a Baby, Two Couples Found Frustration

Sandi Zeman and Tim Timmons are the legal guardians of Peruvian boys they want to adopt. But deceitful or incompetent lawyers and changes in Peru’s adoption system have left them in a legal limbo that keeps them from finishing the adoption process.

Their two cases are examples of how complicated and frustrating adoption can be in Peru.

“Every Peruvian adoption we have seen or heard of has a horror story of its own,” said Timmons, 29.

He and his wife came to Peru from their home in Lithonia, Ga., last June. A U.S. adoption agency had promised them a baby.

“It sounded good,” Timmons recalled. “They told us it would be four to six weeks, maybe eight weeks at the most.”

They were not told that the baby had suffered respiratory distress syndrome and was disabled. They rejected that baby and received guardianship of another. But their lawyer did not tell them that such custody was illegal before the baby was declared abandoned under recently changed laws administered by a new Technical Secretariat of Adoption.

The secretariat refuses to proceed with the adoption, and the judge who granted guardianship refuses to finish the adoption process, Timmons said.

“So we’re like a Ping-Pong ball between the two,” he said.

Now with his fifth lawyer, he is waiting for a break in the case while he takes care of year-old Andrew in a modest boardinghouse.

“I have been here taking my wife’s place the last (four) months,” he said. “She was here four months.”

Timmons is a graphic designer, and his wife is an insurance claims examiner. He said he will lose his job if he does not return to it soon.

“We’re so desperate,” he said. “We’ve done just about everything we can.”

Zeman, 37, is in the same predicament and in the same boardinghouse, where she cares for 11-month-old Brandon. She already has lost her job as a schoolteacher in Greenwood, Va. Her husband, a contractor and carpenter, has been back and forth several times.

The Zemans also had to give up the first baby in their custody. Their lawyer apparently had given the baby’s impoverished mother money and food to hand the baby over, but the mother “didn’t understand she was putting it up for adoption,” Zeman said.

She said her second lawyer charged her $6,700 “and we weren’t even halfway through the process, but she kept assuring us everything was going to work out.” It didn’t, and the Zemans are now paying another lawyer.

In December, a judged ordered the Timmonses and Zemans to give up the babies in their custody. They did so but moved into an orphanage with them. Zeman said the bathrooms had no running water and the beds had bedbugs.

“My baby got an infection,” she said. They were given custody of the babies again after an outbreak of chickenpox in the orphanage.

Zeman fears that she and her husband will have to sell their house if the process drags on much longer, but she said her love for Brandon and thoughts of the squalid orphanage keep her from considering the alternative.

“If we give up, what kind of a future does he have?” she asked.