Government bars American family from contacting daughter

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NEW YORK, June 21, 2011— When seven-year-old Ciaran Long was told that he was about to welcome a baby sister, he had no idea that he would be waiting three long years and still be no closer to her than holding her photograph. Neither did his parents.

“To say that he can’t understand all this is an understatement,” relates his mother Beth Long. “We can’t understand it ourselves.”

Matthew and Beth Long of Merritt Island, Florida received their approval to adopt a little girl they have named Ava in August 2008. She is living at Bac Lieu, an orphanage in a rural area in the southwestern part of Vietnam, about an eight-hour drive from Ho Chi Minh (formerly Saigon).

At the time of their referral, their agency told them that they would travel to Vietnam to bring her home within four to five months. Those few months stretched into more months and then into years. “We have kept our lives on hold, waiting and waiting for Ava,” says Beth. The family has kept a room for her, full of toys and clothing that she regularly outgrows.

The Longs are one of sixteen families, known as the “pipeline” families who were given U.S. and Vietnamese approval to adopt orphans back in 2008, but who have been trapped in limbo as regulations in both countries shift and change.

The Longs, like the other pipeline families, are living in an absurdist, Kafka-esque world, with shifting political landscapes and maddening red tape, all of which has led to the suffering of their daughter, who has been condemned to life an orphanage with few nutritional, medical and educational resources in one of Vietnam’s poorest provinces.

“It’s unreal. These children have been there for two years, told they have a family, that their family is coming, but we don’t and they can’t understand it. They’re losing trust in adults,” notes Beth. “They are building up serious trust issues that will haunt them for life.”