Local teacher takes adoption plea to D.C.

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t has been three years since Angie McDonald began trying to adopt the child she calls Jada.

In that time, Jada has grown from an infant to a dark-eyed toddler and McDonald still has not been allowed to bring her home from Vietnam, where she has lived in an orphanage almost since birth.

McDonald is one of 16 parents in the same predicament. All started adoptions about three years ago, and all are entangled in a spider web of international regulations.

Last week they converged from seven states on Washington to tell their stories to their senators and to U.S. State Department officials in charge of international adoptions.

"One thing they did say to me was, 'Nothing turns the dial like an angry mom.' "

Officially, the news is not promising.

"Intercountry adoption from Vietnam remains suspended," it states on the State Department website. "There is no estimate as to when adoptions will resume."

That's because Vietnam has not yet signed the Hague Convention, an international agreement meant to protect the international adoption process - and the children involved - from fraud, corruption and human trafficking.

Some of those abuses were alleged to have happened in Vietnam around the time McDonald, 43, a psychology professor at Palm Beach Atlantic University, applied to adopt. In an attempt to clean up adoption abuses, the Vietnamese official in charge of adoption froze pending adoptions, including hers.

State Department officials have been attempting to get those adoptions back in the pipeline, but it's been slow. So slow that three of the original adoptive parents, and one child in the orphanage, died.

The earliest possible break could be Oct. 1, when Vietnam is expected to sign the Hague Convention, which imposes standards for adoptions.

Meanwhile, McDonald worries about conditions at the orphanage, where mental patients are housed in a nearby building on the same small campus and where the orphaned children are eating little but rice and watered-down milk.