Money can buy happiness

For $60,000, Mike and Ronica Bishop bought screams, giggles, regular trips to the toy store, endless questions and the sincerest hugs and kisses they’ll ever experience.

“I love you, Mom,” 6-year-old Emily Odine Bishop whispers loudly into Ronica’s ear before running down the hall in their Bonners Ferry home to find out what kind of trouble her brother, 4-year-old Michael Odelin Bishop, is in. John Bishop, 1, lays on the living room carpet nearby playing with his toes and paying no attention to the activity around him.

“We paid for five adoptions and got three children,” Ronica says, showing no sign of frustration. With the children playing around her, she can’t stop smiling.

The Bishops really got two children. Ronica gave birth to John. She and Mike adopted Emily and Michael from Haiti. Eight-year-old Frantz, brother to Emily and Michael, is still in Haiti waiting for the completion of the adoption process.

Michael is only 25 and Ronica is 26. They’ve begged, borrowed and labored for every cent they’ve spent. They’d hardly finished their bachelor’s degrees at Northwest College in Seattle when they began searching for the right place to adopt. They had no reproductive problems as far as they knew. But both agreed they wanted to make a difference in the world. Adoption was their way.

From their first date, the young couple talked about raising 12 children. On their second date, they named their potential kids – Emily for Ronica’s grandmother, Michael for Mike, John Paul Thomas for Mike’s three best friends. They watched adoption shows on television. They studied the domestic adoption scene and learned they were too young for most programs. Then, Mike found Precious in His Sight on the Internet.

The program, which has since disbanded, found adoptive families for children from Haiti. Mike and Ronica read about the incredibly poor country where mothers give up their children because they can’t feed them. They read that dark-skinned boys older than 3 were the least likely children worldwide to be adopted.

The Bishops decided they had to adopt Haitian boys, with one exception. A picture on the Web site of a little girl – Odine – won both their hearts.

“I could tell she had real attitude,” Mike says, laughing. “We liked her right away.”

Adoptions through the Haitian program cost $12,000 each. Mike and Ronica weren’t deterred. The program’s American representative began the process with background checks and a home visit to the Bishops. The representative told them Odine was shy and withdrawn, felt abandoned and wasn’t likely to get adopted. She was 3. Everything they heard told the Bishops that Odine was a child they wanted.

They also wanted a baby boy. The orphanage director remembered that Odine was dropped off with a baby brother, but the boy was in another orphanage. The Bishops found Odelin on the Internet and he looked just like Odine. Their two half-brothers already were in the adoption process with another family.

“I told God he needed to provide the money if we were meant to do this,” Ronica says. “Friends started handing us money. I was nannying for a Microsoft millionaire and asked for a loan. He said he didn’t believe in debt and gave us $12,000.”

In May 2001, Mike and Ronica spent four days of a weeklong Florida honeymoon in Haiti. They arranged to meet Odine, whom they decided to name Emily Odine, but communication broke down. As a taxi driver who took them to the wrong orphanage tried to rob them, the orphanage director – a 70-year-old Canadian woman – intervened and got them to the right orphanage.

Ronica yelled “Odine’s mama” and security guards let them right in. Odine waited in a party dress, but she was screaming.

“It may be she’d never seen a white woman,” Ronica says.

It wasn’t until other children at the orphanage clamored for attention from the Bishops that Odine claimed Ronica as her mom. A deep bond between Odine and Mike and Ronica grew in three days. The Bishops met Odelin and saw him take his first steps. They grieved when they left because neither Odine nor Odelin could leave with them. Ronica picked up Odine eight months later, in January 2002. Odelin’s orphanage claimed it never had received the Bishops’ $12,000 for his adoption. Mike and Ronica managed with threats of legal action to have Odelin moved to Odine’s orphanage, where the adoption process began again with another $12,000. He finally arrived in Seattle in July last year.

Political upheaval in Haiti cost the Bishops another $12,000. They had begun the adoption process for Frantz, whom they plan to name William Frantz after Ronica’s maiden name, when Aristide’s government was overthrown. Haitian Social Services was processing the Bishops’ adoption. The department closed for three months. Ronica, Emily, Michael and John participated in a cross-country drive in the United States in March to bring attention to the Haitian orphans living through the turmoil without food and water. Social Services has reopened. The Bishops are still waiting for Frantz.

Emily and Michael show few signs of their Haitian beginnings. Their English is fluent and comfortable. Emily’s bright pink bedroom is stuffed with Barbies and braids with a rainbow of ties cover her head. She’s a vivacious, loving little girl no one would call withdrawn.

Michael’s lime green room is full of stuffed animals and toy cars. The kids joke that baby John will be surprised someday to learn he’s not black. Mike and Ronica have said nothing about race, waiting to see what the kids want to know.

“Emily was looking in the mirror with me and she said, ‘Dad, I’m black, I’m black, I’m black,’ and that was it,” Mike says, smiling.

The Bishops stay in touch with the kids’ mother, Marie Renee, in Haiti. They drive Emily to Sandpoint Community Christian School where she just won an award for her compassion.

“I like recess. I like the tire swings,” Emily says with a bright smile she’s rarely without. “I like living here very much.”

Ronica’s mother, Judi Hartley in Coeur d’Alene, sees her grandchildren every weekend and adores everything about them. But she doubts 12 children really are in the future for Mike and Ronica.

“They’ll calm down,” she says. “Emily is my pride and joy and the boys have taken my heart. But I don’t know about 12.”