Choosing to SEE - Mary Beth Chapman [40]
16
Rambo Goes to China
It’s crazy when love gets ahold of you
And it’s crazy things that love will make you do
And it’s crazy but it’s true
You really don’t know love at all
Until it’s making you do
Something crazy
“Something Crazy”
Words and music by Steven Curtis Chapman
and Matt Bronleewe
About ten hours after our cozy evening at the Moores’, I got an email from the adoption facilitator who would help us while we were in China. We had worked with her before and had stayed in contact ever since.
The facilitator’s email title was simple: cancel all china plans!
The Chinese government was going to close adoptions until the SARS epidemic passed. Each province was closing at a different time, but the whole country would eventually shut down regarding adoption. We’d just have to wait it out.
My first thought was about Stevey Joy and the pitiful picture of her, so pasty white and frail. What if SARS swept through her orphanage?
“Okay,” I said to my safety-conscious, follow-the-rules husband. “What if I go to China today?”
Steven just stared at me like, “Oh, no, here we go again with another Mary Beth idea that could get totally crazy.” He knew better than to say, “You’re kidding, right?” He knew I wasn’t.
At this point it was about 8:00 a.m. I got Steven’s then-assistant, Melissa Banek, on the phone and asked her to start checking on flights to China. I had a visa; all I needed was to somehow get my official travel letter. I convinced Steven to call the facilitator in China. He asked her if by chance we could intercept the final travel documents before they were put in the mail to us, if we could fly today, go straight to the province before it closed, and have someone meet us there with the travel papers. (If those papers had already been on their way to us from China, there would have been nothing that we could do but wait . . . and wait . . . and wait.)
The facilitator told Steven that she would check with the China Center of Adoption Affairs to see if we could pick up our documents in Hunan. She’d call us back.
We held our breath.
Melissa called back on another phone; she was on the line with a travel agent.
“There’s a flight at 1:00 p.m.,” she said. “Oh, wait, it just disappeared off the screen.”
I freaked out. China was starting to cancel flights! I had to get there!
“Okay,” Melissa said, “there’s another flight at 3:00 p.m. It goes to L.A. and then on to Guangzhou. From there you can fly in-country to Changsha.”
“Hold two seats!” I told her.
I called my calm, steady, wonderful friend Jan Moore. Jan had her overalls on and was in the middle of painting her master bedroom. As far as she was concerned, our trip to China was at least a couple of months away.
“Jan!” I said. “Whatcha doin’? Do you want to go to China, like today?”
Silence on the phone.
“They’re going to close China because of SARS!” I said. “Right now Hunan Province is open, but they’re going to close! I’m not sure we can pull it off, but if we go today, I think we can get there before Hunan closes. We’ve got to try! Let’s go bring our baby girls home!”
Jan started hyperventilating and crying at the same time.
“Here, talk to Geoff,” she said, handing the phone to her husband.
“Geoff,” I said, “here’s the deal. China’s going to close, but it’s still open right now. I don’t know if this will really work. We may just get as far as L.A., look at the palm trees, grab an In-N-Out burger, and then turn around and come home. But you know me; we’ve got to at least try. Just dump all your adoption paperwork in a bag and have Jan bring it. We’ll figure it out later.”
While all of this was going on, I had also realized that if our husbands weren’t going to be with us in China, Jan and I needed powers of attorney to sign the adoption papers without them. We could get the paperwork done in Nashville and have it state sealed, but it had to be authenticated in Washington, D.C. Once executed, it could be sent by FedEx from D.C. to China.
The whole time my husband held to a relative calm but was not sure if he should