When we received the referral to adopt Marco, I changed the background on my computer to Bogotá’s skyline and I started reading voraciously about Colombian history and culture. I was so excited to see a new nation and for most of our family, a new continent. But I quickly realized my attention was misaimed. We were not journeying to Colombia; we were journeying to Marco. Our mission was to bring home Marco and on Thursday, September 8th, we were set to meet him.
We woke up well rested our first morning in Bogotá. We were still unsettled though. We made coffee, ate breakfast, and got dressed up for our visit to the orphanage. Once we were dressed and fed, we waited. We waited for our ride with Jairo. I am sure Jairo is a fixture in many families adoption stories and I will share more about him as we go on. As I was saying, we waited for Jairo. He was punctual, we were just ready early and those waiting moments felt like an eternity. We waited, laid around, waited. I tried to nap. Erin wanted to run to the store and buy candy to celebrate with the kids at the orphanage, but I refused her request for fear that Jairo might arrive and ask where she was and my lack of Spanish would leave us stranded. This speaks to our family’s dependence on Erin, which will also be well documented as we go on.
Jairo picked up the Pfeiffers at 10am. We were dressed in our best as he wove us through the bustling traffic of Bogotá. Whenever I travel to a new city I try my best to seek out another Presbyterian pastor to make a friend. Our denomination’s mission agency, MTW, has a team in Bogotá and I visited one of their churches. The pastor, Andrew, later took me out for a beer and I asked him a million questions about Bogotá and Colombia. He told me that cars get upset if motorcycles are not “on the stripes.” In other words, cars drive in the lanes and the motorcycles (of which there are probably 20 per block) ride on the shoulders and in the middle. Its not unlike many places outside the States, but I have never visited somewhere with this many motorcycles flooding the middle and sides of streets, filling every gap.
Jairo threaded the needle through the buses, cars, and motorcycles to get us to La Casa de la Madre y Niño. We were escorted into a glass waiting room thinking he might be walked past us at any moment. While waiting Silas and Lucy played with the resident teddy bears.
We were then moved to a conference room. On the table were two white binders. The top binder said “Juan Jose Ricardo Garcia.”
It contained every document about this little 8 kilo, 8 month old human being. On the bottom was a binder that said “Pfeiffer.” It contained every single adoption document we filed over the past six and a half years. The binders were stacked opposite ways as if to say, “these two complement each other.”
We finally had company; Ennis (sp?), who has worked at the orphanage for 47 years, and Juliana, a young child psychologist. The conversation was a vibrant exchange amongst the women. Erin, Ennis, and Juliana exchanged stories, biographical anecdotes, medical information, and then it came to business. Ennis was full of wisdom. Juliana intuitively zeroed in on Lucy, the once baby, now middle child, and immediately engaged her.Before that she briefed us on the psychological state of a child who has spent their life in an orphanage.
For Marco, that looked like coming home from birth at a hospital to an orphanage, contracting H1N1, then a respiratory infection, and spending most of his life in an isolated area of the orphanage. The care he received was wonderful and full of compassion, but no doubt lonely. More on this in a later post.
After preparing us that our baby would be strapped to an oxygen tank via tubes, they brought him in.
I fed him soup while Erin learned his medical regimen. He was grabby and floppy. He could not hold himself up and could barely keep food
in his mouth—something for which Julianna prepared us. He had received therapy to work on his mouth skills, but he was still behind the curve. As the soup went from bowl to spoon to mouth to my lap, Erin took notes at a feverish pace. Marco required two inhalers, a nebulizer, a steroid, an antibiotic, a medication for acid reflux, all while on oxygen.
Marco’s brown eyes were impressive as advertised. He was not warm to us, as expected. We were more adults on his path to survival. I’m sure on some small level he was curious why we were walking him away from the doting affections of the care at La Casa. We took a picture outside and Jairo helped us get to the cab: 2 parents, 1 redheaded big brother, 1 eccentric sister, an oxygen tank, and a baby. On the cab ride home, he slept in Erin’s lap.
austin pfeiffer 
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