Frederick resident Andy Hirshorn relaxed with Michael and Mimi Farley of Mount Airy on Friday, watching a pool full of loudly splashing kids, three of their own and two visiting through the Kidsave International program.
Hirshorn said it has been nice hosting 14-year-old Alfonzo through the program where families take in orphans from Colombia and advocate to find families for them.
His 10-year-old son Danny has liked having someone else in the house, Hirshorn said, and the two boys went together to football camp.
“Alfonzo is very caring, looks after him,” Hirshorn said.
Walking by, daughter Paula, 13, stopped short. “That’s my job!” she said indignantly.
“What is? Making him upset or looking after him?” Hirshorn laughed.
“Both!” she said as she jumped back into the pool near her little brother.
The Hirshorn family is not new to the program.
Two years ago Andy Hirshorn and his wife Cathy were looking into adoption from China when a friend suggested they meet one of the Kidsave girls in the area. They did, and they hit it off.
“It seemed right and it’s been really a blessing for our family,” Hirshorn said of adopting Paula. “We can’t remember not having her, she’s just that much imbedded in the family, even with cousins and grandparents … She’s done great.”
That made it an easy decision to host Alfonzo, Paula’s good friend, who they met while visiting Colombia during the adoption process.
“I met him and got to spend a lot of time with him there, and just felt like he needed a shot at finding a family,” Hirshorn said. In a few years Alfonzo will be out of the system. “There are not a lot of nets in Colombia to help catch these kids.”
The Farleys’ interest in Kidsave began last summer after seeing a newspaper article.
“I actually carried the article around with me for a while,” Mimi Farley said.
They had a brief family meeting with daughter Jamie, 14, before deciding to take the plunge.
“It felt like it was meant to be,” Mimi said.
The couple thought it would be good for their daughter to meet other children and have experience with another culture.
The family ended up with Marvy, 12, who is here until Aug. 3 for the five-week program.
The decision to host is a huge commitment, but Mimi said it has been a good process for the family.
“There are some really good people through the community, you make other connections…. it restores your faith in humanity,” she said.
Meeting a child’s fundamental needs is easy, Michael Farley said. Promoting children to give them a chance at forever families, which involves going to events and introducing them to friends, is more work.
“It’s one thing to donate money to a cause,” he said, “but when you get fully involved, you get an appreciation for the courage of these kids to come here.”
The language barrier can be a nuisance. Mimi is originally from Argentina, she said, but was young when she left. Michael has brushed up his junior high Spanish; with a lot of gesturing, it works out, he said.
“All these kids are bright, you can tell that they’re bright,” he said. “A lot of the host families here don’t speak a lick of Spanish.”
The program also supplies help. Social workers are just a call away to help with language, culture or general rough spots. Kidsave holds multiple events for families and children, along with chances for interested families to meet the young Colombians.
Michael Farley said the program chooses children who can succeed through the stress of the process.
“All these kids are where they are because their lives haven’t been sweet chocolate and fuzzy bunnies so far,” he said. “They’ve got something special about them; they’ve got that inner strength, that self-motivation.”
Jenna Nusholtz with the registered nonprofit Kidsave International said out of the 1,700 kids who have visited through the program since 1999, more than 80 percent of participants have been adopted or are in the process of being adopted. Though the organization is not an adoption agency, it will help families interested in adopting children by pointing them toward the correct channels.
To be hosts, families go through a mini-home study — not as lengthy or involved as an adoption. The house is checked and parents are interviewed together; children are interviewed separately. The host family pays a fee of about $1,525 to have the child stay, along with food, clothing and activities for the five weeks.
The rest of the costs are covered by Kidsave fundraising. Nine Colombian children, ages 8 to 13, came to Washington, D.C., Virginia and Maryland this summer.
Families are not allowed to talk about adoption around the children, though with recent policy changes, the children are now told that some in the exchange program end up meeting people who adopt them, while others do not.
Both the Farleys and Hirshorns say they are hosting for advocacy instead of adoption this summer.
To learn more about Kidsave International or the Summer Miracles Program, visit www.kidsave.org, contact Lauren Gorden at 310-642-7283 or email summermiracles@kidsave.org.
acochrun@gazette.net
Copyright © 2012 Post-Newsweek Media, Inc./Gazette.Net