'God decided before he was born that I am his mother'
'God decided before he was born that I am his mother'Mohammed Adam The Ottawa Citizen Sunday, August 31, 2008
The Nairobi High Court Building is a grand monument to justice, but when Peggy Taillon stepped into Courtroom 33 one fateful February morning, she wondered what kind of justice awaited her.
A year-long quest to adopt a child, during which she unknowingly violated key parts of the Kenyan adoption law, had come down to an all-or-nothing showdown in a courtroom where many had seen their dreams shattered. Ms. Taillon, at the time the vice-president of community engagement and advocacy at The Ottawa Hospital, was far from home and very worried. She had been warned by her lawyer to prepare for the worst, and she could hardly breathe as she sat down, flanked by her mother and father.
It was Feb. 29.
The presiding judge didn't mince words. He reeled off Ms. Taillon's many violations of the law, including taking custody of a baby only 11 hours after his birth without the knowledge or approval of the Kenyan authorities. And as a single woman, she had ‘adopted’ a boy when the law forbids a single person from adopting a child of the opposite sex -- except under the most extenuating circumstances.
It was a biting indictment, and as the judge called out to address her directly, her heart sank. It's over, she thought.
But in a move that caught everyone by surprise, the judge instead threw down the gauntlet. He asked Ms. Taillon to tell him why, in spite of the mountain of evidence against her, he should still allow her to adopt the child.
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The saga of Peggy and Devlin Taillon began innocently a year ago January as Ms. Taillon and her friend, Wendy Muckle, a nurse who runs Ottawa's Inner City Health agency, flew to Nairobi to work on a poverty-reduction project in rural Kenya. Ms. Muckle and a small group had set up the project to help women and orphaned children in Asembo Bay, about 40 kilometres west of Kisumu, western Kenya's main city. Ms. Taillon, 40, was going to Kenya for the first time.
She had long wanted to adopt a child from Africa. On the flight, she confided in her friend that she would use the trip to research the adoption process in Kenya.
As the two women settled into their work in the village, they decided one evening to meet one of Ms. Muckle's friends for dinner at a restaurant. They found him in a state of considerable agitation.
The man had just found out that his 14-year-old sister-in-law was about to have a baby the family couldn't support. And the mother was just too young and traumatized to care for it. The family was devastated and didn't know what to do, he said.
It all turned surreal very quickly. Ms. Muckle blurted out that Peggy would take care of the child and things just snowballed from there.
‘Wendy said, in the way Wendy says things, 'You should talk to Peggy because she wants to adopt a child',’ Ms. Taillon recalls.
She was dumbfounded, but in spite of herself, felt her heart racing with excitement.
As the conversation continued, ‘one thing led to another’ and before the evening was over, the three of them had agreed the idea just might work. They decided to give it a shot.
‘Devlin had not even been born and I am thinking, 'Is this real, is it even possible? Can this be done?' ‘ she says. ‘At the same time I am saying to myself, 'You believe things happen for a reason,' so I decided, why not go along this path and see what might happen.’
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She phoned her parents to tell them what she was contemplating. Once they got past the initial surprise, they pledged their full support.
Ms. Muckle acknowledges that the adoption began in the most unusual circumstances. She says initially Ms. Taillon, who was drained after a busy day, didn't want to go out for dinner. She wanted to sleep, but agreed to go out only after Ms. Muckle said the evening would be short.
After their dinner date spoke about the pregnancy, Ms. Muckle says she just turned to her friend and said, somewhat jokingly: ‘ 'You'll take care of the baby, won't you, Peggy?' She didn't know what I was talking about but said, 'Of course I'll take care of the baby. What do I have to do?' It was the weirdest thing. How it happed was very odd. But things happen for reason.’
Barely 24 hours later, as Ms. Taillon was buying school supplies in the market for some of the boys they were helping, Ms. Muckle, who was in another part of town, phoned with startling news. ‘Your baby’ was born the night before, she said to an astonished Ms. Taillon, and the family was on the way to deliver the newborn.
Because the mother was so young, she hadn't realized she was pregnant until very late, and the due date was a guessing game until she went into labour.
They agreed that Ms. Muckle would go ahead to meet the arriving party. Ms. Taillon would wrap up her work and wait for transportation, which duly arrived in the form of a man on a motorcycle. She set off helmetless in the African dusk toward the Kisumu slums with a total stranger.
‘At one point during the ride, I had this headline flashing through my head: 'Canadian woman found dead near Lake Victoria',’ she recalls.
They arrived safely, however, and her thoughts turned to the baby and the family. The mother and the newborn, accompanied by the mother's older sister and guardian, had travelled from their village to the home of a relative in a Kisumu slum named Dunga Estates. The life-changing meeting took place in a small room that was part of a larger building that housed a bar.
The more she thought about it, the more Ms. Taillon questioned the propriety of the adoption. She was concerned that people would perceive her as a white woman who had barged into town to take advantage of a poor and emotionally unstable African teenager and her family. She resolved to talk them out of it. But as soon as the baby was thrust into her arms, she was so overwhelmed by a powerful surge of emotion that her resolve melted.
She knew then that she wanted the baby. The young mother and her family were eager to oblige, but Ms. Taillon still wondered about the ethics of it. She explained to the family that giving up the child meant a severing of the relationship between mother and son. She told them adoption was not the same as sponsoring an orphan, a relationship many of them were used to. Giving up the baby meant he would have her as a new mother, and they'd both be off to Canada. She tried to persuade the young mother to reconsider, but the girl was adamant -- she didn't want the baby. An orphan herself, the teenager said she couldn't be a mother and didn't want to be one. She just wanted to go to school.
‘I said, 'You need to understand that if we do this, it is permanent. The baby will always be a part of your family, if you wish, but he comes home with me to Canada',’ Ms. Taillon says. ‘I was really concerned about her state of mind, but after spending some time with her I felt comfortable that this is what she wanted to do.’
Even so, Ms. Taillon wanted to leave the baby with the mother to allow for more reflection, and then pick him up later, but the family insisted she must take custody immediately.
On Jan. 17, a week after Ms. Taillon arrived in Kenya as a volunteer development worker, she was the proud mother of Devlin Hera Taillon, aged 11 hours. She was over the moon.
‘I was always worried that Kenyans will see me and make a bad judgment against me and Devlin, but it was the opposite. They'll hear our story and say 'God bless you',’ Ms. Taillon says.
Throughout a roller-coaster week, no one stepped back to ask whether what they were doing was actually legal.
When Ms. Taillon began to talk to adoption agencies and officials, they told her again and again that there was no way the adoption would be approved.
No one knew anything about her because she hadn't been cleared by any authority as fit to adopt a child, and she wasn't going to get permission to leave the country with a baby acquired under what seemed to be dubious circumstances.
International adoption law requires that prospective parents must first be cleared in their home countries. In Ontario, the process involves getting an adoption agency certified to operate in the potential adoptee's country to undertake the vetting, and then present a report to the provincial government for approval.
Ms. Taillon should have done this before leaving Canada, but because her primary purpose for going to Kenya was not adoption the thought had never occurred to her.
She was forced to return Devlin to his birth family and return to Canada. The baby was put in the care of his aunt; his birth mother had put the whole experience behind her and gone back to school. Ms. Taillon made sure they had enough supplies to last several months and called from Canada every other day.
The only Canadian agency registered in Kenya she could find wouldn't take up her case because they thought she had no chance of success. Kenya has stringent adoption laws, the latest of which was passed in 2002 to protect children from child traffickers. A key element of the law, which Ms. Taillon had broken, was the requirement that single men or women adopt only children of their own sex.
The agency saw no extenuating circumstances that would allow her to legally adopt Devlin. But Ms. Taillon, who advocates in Ontario for things she believes in, was in her element. She persisted, and eventually the Toronto-based agency accepted her application -- without any guarantee of success. She then lobbied the Ontario children's services department and other government officials and got their support as well. As soon as her file was forwarded to the government for approval, she left once again for Kenya. This was early April.
Ms. Taillon picked up Devlin from his aunt in Kisumu and moved to Nairobi, the capital, to resume her pursuit of the adoption.
The mood of the Kenyan authorities had not changed. Week after week, from office to office, she hit brick walls. Every official she spoke to said the adoption was doomed and it would be better if she went back home.
‘Every person I spoke to said, 'You need to understand that this has never been done under the Children's Act. It can't be done',’ Ms. Taillon says. ‘The problem was that I had not as yet been approved by Kenya as a person with whom a child can be placed and yet I had taken custody of a child who had not yet been given to the state nor ever been placed in an orphanage. And this was against the law.’
The battle took its toll. She had taken up residence in a Nairobi hotel, and with Devlin slung in a baby carrier attached to her chest, she went from office to office, day after day, vainly looking for answers. She was frustrated, exhausted and emotionally spent, and many of her friends in Canada advised her to come home. Ms. Taillon says being alone made life even tougher, but she refused to give up.
‘There were a couple of times that I was pretty low but I had a child to take care of,’ she says.
Her parents were so worried that her mother, Denise, flew in.
‘She was there alone all by herself and she was feeling so lonely we thought she needed some support,’ Denise Taillon says.
Out of desperation, Ms. Taillon turned to a man she had come to know -- the then-foreign minister Raphael Tuju, the MP for the area where she was doing her development work. Mr. Tuju introduced her to the man who was then vice-president, Moody Awori, and explained her situation. Both promised to help and before long, she was having a meeting with the head of Kenya's Children's Services. Another meeting with the department's adoption officials was arranged, and for the first time, Ms. Taillon felt the tide was turning in her favour. Her first meeting with the adoption committee gave her hope.
‘They said, 'We should be telling you today it is not worth putting in an application, but we will review your documents and get back to you',’ Ms. Taillon recalls.
She acknowledges that Mr. Tuju's intervention was a significant turning point. It opened doors that were previously closed to her, allowing her to make her case, in person, to the real decision-makers. But she was very sensitive to perceptions of political interference because of the involvement of a senior cabinet minister. She didn't want to leave the impression that she was using her influence to get her way. In meetings with senior officials, she would stress time and again that she was not seeking preferential treatment, but a chance to tell her story and be judged on its merits.
‘Mr Tuju's involvement put my case higher on the officials' radar and it gave me an opportunity to see them, and for them to hear me and see me with Devlin,’ she said. ‘But I was really worried about the perception of political interference and I made it clear to them I wasn't asking for any special favours.’
In the meantime, she hired a lawyer in Nairobi to represent her and, finally, the adoption committee endorsed her as a prospective parent. It was a huge victory, but one more hurdle remained. The courts had the final say.
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Ms. Taillon's hopes of a quick resolution to enable her to leave Kenya before Christmas were dashed when court delays pushed a hearing to January 2008. After her father, Michael, flew in, she decided the family would spend Christmas outside Nairobi. They checked into the Paradise Hotel in the resort town of Kilifi, outside Mombasa.
After barely a week there, the family found itself in danger. Many Kenyans felt opposition leader Raila Odinga had been cheated out of victory against the incumbent president, Mwai Kibaki, in the December election, violence erupted in several parts of the country, trapping Ms. Taillon.
‘When Mwai Kibaki was declared the winner of the election, the whole place just blew up and there was rioting everywhere. Literally 100 yards from Paradise, 17 people were killed on the first night of the violence,’ she says.
‘But it wasn't safe to leave.’
For days, violence raged around them. Because of a news blackout, there was very little useful information on television and she had to rely on text messages from Ms. Muckle in Canada on what BBC, CNN or CBC was reporting. Friends in Kenya also phoned and warned her to stay put because it was too dangerous to travel.
‘When it was safe to leave, we couldn't go through to Mombasa, we couldn't get to Nairobi because it was still dangerous to do that. The best we could do was go north,’ she says.
Eventually her party made it safely to Nairobi, but a Jan. 25 court appearance was postponed to Feb. 29, a day Ms. Taillon describes as ‘a seminal moment’ in her life.
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She hadn't come to the East African country, Ms. Taillon told the judge, to break its laws or challenge authority; she hadn't even come to adopt a child. She was there to do development work, and found herself in a whirlwind that swept her to a destiny with a child who hadn't even been born when she arrived. Fate brought them together, she told the judge, and nothing could have reversed it.
‘I said to him that I have lived my life believing that things happen for a reason. I said that of all the children in the world, and all the mothers in the world, the two of us were put together because it was meant to happen. God decided before he was born that I am his mother,’ Ms. Taillon says.
‘I told him that I love Kenya and it was now my second home. I said, 'I promise you Devlin will know his heritage, he will know his birth family and we will return to this country every year.' There was not a dry eye in the courtroom when I finished. One woman shouted 'Amen.' ‘
Ms. Taillon says that when he uttered the word ‘Granted,’ the courtroom erupted in cheers. An improbable adoption quest had come to an improbably successful end.
The court victory was a huge relief, but Ms. Taillon said she was so stressed and emotionally drained it took days for the full impact to sink in. A week later, she organized a party for all her friends and then concluded the paperwork required to make her the legal guardian of the young mother, who is now back in school. Ms. Taillon pays for her education and supports the family.
At last count, the year-long odyssey cost her $70,000, but Ms. Taillon says it was worth every cent.
She then arrived in Ottawa only to pull her own surprise, announcing to stunned friends and colleagues that she was giving up her $200,000-a-year job at The Ottawa Hospital to devote her time to her son.
‘Motherhood has been the most amazing thing in my life,’ she says. ‘I have changed a lot. I know I am a different person and absolutely my priorities have changed.’
Ms. Taillon says as a single woman with a high-powered job, she could cope with the 16-hour workdays and the pagers that went off at odd hours and often had her racing out of the house in response. But not anymore.
‘Devlin is my No. 1 priority and he needs to know I'll be here regularly. I don't know that I can go back and continue my life as before. I owe it to him to find a new role,’ she said. ‘Obviously I have a mortgage and bills and at some point I'll have to go back to work. But it will have to be a job that is predictable.’
Chatting with the family one summer day as Devlin bounced from mother to grandmother in their Alta Vista home, there was no doubt that he is the centre of the Taillon universe. As Ms. Taillon tracked his every step with watchful eyes, grandma acted as sentry, ready to scoop him up at the slightest hint of a tumble. Denise Taillon said she and her husband had almost given up hope of experiencing the joy of grandchildren.
‘The adoption has changed everything in our lives,’ Denise Taillon says. ‘It is so exciting to get up every morning and have little feet running around the house. It is very rewarding.’
Peggy Taillon says she has reflected on the many challenges of an inter-racial adoption and is very confident Devlin will get the best of both worlds. To keep him in touch with his African roots and heritage, she intends to take Devlin to Kenya every year to visit. And growing up in Ottawa, he will get the best Canada has to offer.
Ms. Taillon says much of her life now will be devoted to development work and she has established a foundation named after her son, the Hera Foundation, to promote education and fight poverty among women and orphaned children in rural Kenya. Her hope is that one day, Devlin will take over the foundation.
‘For me, culture is important, heritage is important, where you come from is important, and Devlin is not going to lose that,’ Ms. Taillon says. ‘When he is old enough, I will tell him his story so he understands it.’