A whole new world

When Mark and Tiffani Pullyblank decided to adopt two children, they really didn’t know what they were getting into. In the five years it took to finalize the plan and bring Zach and Rosie home from Uganda, they felt like they’d been through the ringer.

“We were really naïve,” Tiffani said.

By all accounts, they approached the subject with the best intentions. The couple, who have two biological children, wanted to grow their family and were already thinking globally—animator Mark is Canadian and they lived in Vancouver for a while before moving to New Zealand, where he worked on the Hobbit films.

“Why make more kids when there are so many people in the world who don’t have parents?” Mark explained.

“We changed countries several times because we really wanted to adopt kids who had no other support system,” Tiffani added. In 2009, they settled on the east African country of Uganda. That’s when their journey really began.

First, they had to find a lawyer in Uganda to arrange the adoption. Because they wanted two children, and not just one, difficulties were magnified.

“If we were going to adopt from out of the country, transracially, we wanted to adopt more than one child,” Mark said. “In hindsight, we should have done one at a time—but I doubt we would have gone through the process a second time.”

Some of the problems they ran into included hooking up with disreputable representatives in Uganda, one in particular who seemed more interested in money than finding a good home for needy children. First they received an email from him with pictures of kids telling them to choose one. Then they received another, the subject line of which just said, “Esther is dead,” Mark recalled. The whole process started to feel wrong.

“Most people who go into it with altruistic intentions get blindsided by the poverty,” Tiffani said. “These agencies tell sob stories, but poverty is just reality for many countries.”

So, they started over with a lawyer they feel lucky to have found. He went out of his way to find children who truly had no home to go to, no family in Uganda to care for them, they said. In November 2010, just a week after moving back to the United States from New Zealand, they received the phone call to go to Uganda to pick up their children. That trip was a whirlwind, but in the end, they were able to return home with Zach, then 3, and 16-month-old Rosie.

The Pullyblanks’ story may seem extreme, but they are far from alone. In 2010, the year they adopted Zach and Rosie, Americans adopted more than 11,000 children from other countries. That was down from a high of almost 23,000 in 2004, according to the U.S. Department of State. The numbers have steadily decreased, perhaps due to the 2008 implementation of the Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption. The convention establishes checks and balances, as well as standardized requirements for adoptions, between about 90 countries. Uganda is not currently a partner in the convention.

“That would be a really helpful step,” Tiffani said.

Now, the Pullyblanks are settled in Chico, Tiffani’s hometown, and 14-year-old Lucy and 12-year-old Dexter are getting more and more comfortable each day with their younger siblings.

“They were always into it,” Tiffani said. “Dexter had one moment, before we went to Uganda, when he looked at me and said, ‘What if everything changes?’ I said, ‘Well, it will change.’ We’ve had our challenges, but they’ve done great.”

During a recent interview at Caper Acres, Zach seemed shy at first but then opened up, running around smiling and laughing with Rosie and Dexter while Lucy took turns playing and sitting quietly on a bench reading a book.

“There was never a time when the older ones were resentful,” Tiffani said. “Kids have huge needs when they come into your family from trauma. The older kids did get backburnered for a little while, but they handled it really well.”

Once Zach and Rosie arrived in the United States, the family faced a whole new set of challenges. The most basic was that these children had never had a family—they’d been living in an orphans’ home—and suddenly they were surrounded by strangers in a strange place. Children coming from trauma situations can act out in unexpected ways, Tiffani said, and coming from a different culture meant communicating differently as well. Of course, there have been triumphs to go along with the challenges.

“When she first came home, Rosie would giggle uncontrollably and roll around on Tiffani at bedtime, ecstatic to lay with her new mama,” Mark recalled. “Bedtime remains her favorite time of day. Zach would rush to the door when I would come home from work, excited to tell me all the new words he’d learned. We watched them over time learn how to play.”

Cultural differences have played a large role in the Pullyblanks’ new life. For instance, they are suddenly a multiracial family, a concept they embraced but were not completely prepared for.

“Now that we’re raising black children, we have to know how to help them and understand what challenges they face,” Tiffani said. “It gave me a whole different view of racism and the way our society is set up to benefit white people.”

In addition to introducing Zach and Rosie to American culture, Tiffani and Mark have made an effort to learn about life in Uganda. They say they’d like to someday go back and live there for a few months.

“Uganda is an amazing country, where the people have incredibly resilient spirits in the face of so many challenges to their survival. I’d like to think that our brilliant, spunky, beautiful children would have fared well there despite their lack of family support, but that’s a really big question mark,” Tiffani said. “I can’t imagine our family without them, and certainly all the hurdles we have had to overcome have been more than worth it, but if the world was a better place they’d be with their first mothers, never having known the pain and shock of that separation.

“The adoption itself is just the first step—the learning and growing and adjusting continues for all of us, likely for a lifetime.”