“Somebody’s Got to Do It, and Why Can’t It Be Us?” – An Adoption Story

Via Patricia Heaton (who you really should follow on Twitter because she’s a font of these types of stories):

From The Daily Mail:

A couple from Missouri has seen their family more than double after they adopted five orphaned siblings from Peru who had sent them an email imploring: ‘We need a mommy and daddy.’

Yhonson, 17, Gerson, 15, Betsi, 12, Joel, 11, and Sibila, nine, are now settling into school and home life in Blue Springs, where they saw snow for the first time after touching down in December.

Before the life-changing move, they spent seven years living in an orphanage after their parents died from tuberculosis. The children refused to be split up, making adoption seem unlikely.

But in January 2011, they met an American visiting the orphanage who helped them write the pleading email to send back to his friends in the United States.

When Lauren and Scott Sterling, who have a three-year-old daughter and a 19-year-old daughter from Scott’s previous marriage, received the message, they didn’t think too much of it.

‘I remember Scott and I looking at that e-mail and thinking about how beautiful the kids were,’ Lauren, 30, wrote on her blog. ‘I even thought, “Someone rich should adopt them”. And then life went on.’

Shortly after, Lauren took a trip to an orphanage in Guatemala and was devastated by how many young babies were without parents while her own daughter had the security of a home.

Then she started thinking about those five beautiful faces she had seen in the email.

‘Somebody’s got to do it, and why can’t it be us?’ Lauren said to her husband.

‘We may eat a lot of spaghetti. I will never buy another $100 pair of jeans again, and who cares? If those are my reasons, it’s just practicality,’ she told Fox4ck.

And so they embarked on the year-long battle to bring the children from Peru to Missouri, hitting numerous roadblocks along the way, including missing identification records for the children.

But over chats on Skype and visits to Peru, the Sterlings soon learned the different personalities of the children and began to think of them as their own.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2267643/Scott-Lauren-Sterling-The-heart-wrenching-email-led-Missouri-family-adopt-orphaned-siblings-Peru.html#ixzz2IvnTPJS8
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