Bridge Collapse Widow Adopts Haitian Twins

(AP)  Betsy Sathers wears the glow of a new mother as she perches on the couch in her family room, smiling and chatting with visitors while still managing to keep an eye on the 2-year-old twins burbling and cavorting at her feet.

Sathers - whose husband was killed when a Minneapolis freeway bridge collapsed into the Mississippi River in 2007 - is realizing her dreams of being a mother with the adoption of Ross and Alyse from Haiti.

The twins, brought to Sathers' home just days after the earthquake in Haiti, suck from baby bottles and drag toys across the floor. On the wall hangs a framed wedding day photo of Sathers and her late husband, Scott.

"I wasn't sure if I would ever be a wife again, and I was really all right with that. But I knew that I wanted to be a mom and I thought about it and I prayed about it a long, long time," Sathers said.

Betsy and Scott Sathers had been married just 10 months when the Interstate 35W bridge fell apart in August 2007, killing 13 people and injuring 145 injured.

The young couple had talked about starting a family. At the time of the collapse, Betsy Sathers had thought she might even be pregnant. She later found she was not, adding to her pain: "I was grieving the loss of my husband and the family we had hoped to have together."

Now the children she hoped to have are finally here.

"I don't think I rescued them," Sathers, 33, said of the twins. "I feel like if anything, they've rescued me."

Sathers started the paperwork to adopt from Haiti last January. On Aug. 17, she received the referral - boy-girl twins.

Special Report: Road to Recovery in Haiti

She made three trips to Haiti to visit her children, the last one over New Year's Day. The quake hit Jan. 12, killing at least 150,000 people. Sathers, back home in her northern Minneapolis suburb, didn't know if her children were alive or dead.

The answer came in a phone call from a stranger - Rob Kramer, chairman and co-founder of Global Water Trust, which works to bring clean water to developing nations, and CEO of PopRule, an Internet technology company. Kramer had flown to Haiti after the quake and was helping legally process children who already had been adopted when he got an e-mail from a friend of Sathers' who told him about the twins.

Kramer was in a car leaving an orphanage when he received the e-mail. He asked the driver to stop in the middle of traffic and went to the van behind him to talk to Lucy Armistead, the founder and head of Kentucky Adoption Services. Armistead had just been at the same orphanage, picking up children eligible to be adopted out of the country.

Kramer said he asked Armistead if she knew "the boy and girl twins, Schneider and Schneidine" - Ross and Alyse's Haitian names - and explained the story. Armistead figured the twins were back at the orphanage. Still, she and her co-worker looked around the van, which was carrying about nine children, and found the twins in the back seat.

"I said, `You've got to be kidding me,"' Kramer recalls. "I said, `Let's just dash to the (U.S.) Embassy."'

Ross and Alyse had survived the quake along with the 45 or so other children at the orphanage. The building in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Carrefour, at the epicenter of the quake, was destroyed, and the children were sleeping in tents and under tarps on a concrete slab across the street.

By Jan. 22, Kramer was on a private jet to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., with the twins. Sathers and her mother rushed to get on a flight to pick up her children.

The twins arrived a little dehydrated and, at 22 pounds each, a bit underweight, Sathers said. But she said the children are gaining weight and taking to American food.

Sathers, a consultant who plans to take a year's leave to be home with the twins, said she hopes people will continue to support Haitians through prayer and donations or volunteer work for relief organizations.

"It's a happy ending for my family, but there's still so much devastation there. There's so many other kids that it's not a happy ending there."

[DSR_57]

Why don't people try adopting American children ?

[Tish1160]

drthvader - Why do you have to say such rotten things? I don't understand why you find it necessary to answer w/ such mean things.

[jcdugger1234]

The only problem she will have is...people will think of her, um, as a lover of the opposite race, shall we say! That is a difficult stigma to overcome...


JD

[Tish1160]

If anyone has an issue with something like that these days has bigger issues to worry about.

[jsmoo]

I just want to say, it is a tremendous blessing to anyone who gets adopted. This lady seems like she will be a GREAT mother and even if she didn't adopt children domestically. Those kids are blessed, she is blessed, and thank God there are good people in the world willing to help those who are less fortunate than even the poorest of individuals in our country. I am amazed that she would even dare to take on this challenge and it appears as though she already committed herself, and it wasn't something done as a goodwill gester. I am so happy that she has stepped in. You never know who she has taken into her bosom. She maybe caring for the person to develop a cure for AIDS, or cancer. You never know.

Additionally, children, unlike adults, love unconditionally, and she will be able to receive from them unconditional love regardless of race, color, creed, or ethnic background. Love conquers all, and her love has just transformed the lives of two precious souls regardless of where they were born. They now have a chance.

Thank God for people like her, and thank God those children who would have suffered irreparable damage without her, now have a fair shot at life.

Who are we to judge, criticize, or condemn any act of love.

Many blessings to this mother and may she and her new family continue to reap a harvest of wealth, good health, and prosperity.

[drthvader]

...then again she might have adopted their generation of serial killers.
Anything is possible.

[goirish1974]

Congratulations Betsy!!! Your husband is looking down on you and your children and he is smiling!

[drthvader]

Where is he looking down from?

[Tish1160]

Not adopting a child here in the US has so much less to do with what others deem fashionable and all to do with the laws. There have been too many times that the biological parent has been able to come back and change their minds years after the child was adopted. The child is ripped away from the only family they have ever known and multiple lives are forever altered. I have already lost 3 children during 2 pregnancy losses to set myself and my family up to be stuffed in a domestic adoption. Unfortunately, we could not afford an international adoption or I would have several children running around my home right now. All that I am saying is be careful what you say and how you say it. So far there have only been ignorant comments left. You never know how you will handle a situation until you are directly involved.

[lloydbest1]

Amen, Tish.

Read my response to endurorob_5.

[TVO1CITW]

What would America do if other countries wanted to adopt our orphans? The flood gates are now open to that because of outside adoptions.

[kay1059]

Why would it matter if someone from another country wanted to adopt one of the thousands of children needing a home here? As long as they had the means to support them I'd say let them go.

[TVO1CITW]

Some orphans have parents somewhere and the instinct in humans is to try to find biological parents. Besides, I do not know of countries outside the US that wants or ask for our kids.

[endurorob_5]

With all the orphans we have in this country why do people feel the need to go to another country to adopt? Is it because idiot celebrities do it so that is the fashionable thing to do?

[drthvader]

Apparently nobody cares about this country's orphans. It's not admirable, it's crazy.

[lloydbest1]

Over 40 years ago I suffered a medical condition that I thought (incorrectly as it turned out) would sterilize me. Adoption was the only option that I had if I wanted a family.
Later on I did. Wanted a child born in the US and I wasn't particular as to color or ethnicity.
What followed was a two year exercise in frustration, bureaucratic obstruction, legalistic maze wandering and horrendous financial investment I could not afford - with no clear assurance that any of it would bear fruit. Mind, that was nearly a half century ago but I can't imagine it's any easier now than it was then to adopt.
So, in answer to your question, endurorob_5; and to provide a possible alternative explanation to drthvader's....It may just simply be easier to adopt from abroad.