Two
Roads Closed Off
After Daniel got back from Washington, we really felt like we had done all we could, at least for the time being. We kept up with the Blevinses and the Badys, and completed the narrative for this website, but we didn’t see anything more we could do.
Then, out of the blue, in late July, we got an email from a woman in North Carolina asking about Building Blocks.
We gave her our standard reply ... don’t walk, run, and never look back, and told her what had happened to us. The same thing we’d told dozens of people over the preceding year and a half.
But, it turned out that this woman wasn’t interesting in adopting through Building Blocks, but rather facilitating for them. She was looking to place Lithuanian children with American families (interesting in itself, because according to rumor Lithuania had shut down adoptions a couple of years before when some people in the government became upset that too many (for them) Lithuanian orphans were being placed with Jewish families in the U.S.)
This was a first. She told us:
I am very interested in working in international adoptions. I have made a number of contracts with attorneys and other individuals in Vilnius. I sent
resumes to a number of agencies. Several responded, but Building Blocks was the first to give me a solid offer of employment. I contacted most of the people on the EEAD agency referral list. They gave me really positive responses regarding their experiences with Building Blocks. I know that some agency directors can be misleading and perhaps even
completely dishonest.[...]
I am sincerely interested in working in international adoptions. The other agencies I spoke with said that they would get back to me in a month or so after they discussed the possibility of starting a new program with their board of directors. Mrs. Hubbards wants a contract from me early next month. I would certainly like to find out some more about her business practices.
Welll, we could sure tell her a lot about that, and get several other people to tell her what the happy clients couldn’t or wouldn’t.
Things must have really gone bad for Denise in Bulgaria if she was jumping like this for a new Eastern European country to traffic children from besides Russia (Romania had already imposed its moratorium by then).
We referred the woman to her fellow Tarheels, Dorothy Blevins and Ashley Ellington. At least it might not cost as much in phone bills for her to talk to them.
We did, however, send her a copy of what was by then Denise’s standard contract, the one that has practically everything non-refundable, allows BBAS to terminate the adoption for pretty much any reason and holds the clients in material breach if they initiate another adoption with any other provider.
“How typical of Denise,” Ashley Ellington told us, “to just jump right at something like that.”
It was their conversations, not ours, that were chiefly responsible for the woman deciding not to work with Denise and Building Blocks after all.
The biggest dealbreaker was the contract, which, she said, gave almost no maneuvering room for the families. She wouldn’t want to work with someone who put such a tight leash on the people who would ultimately be parenting the children she helped place.
She also was disconcerted by what Ashley Ellington noted ... how quickly Denise jumped at the opportunity without even bothering to check her and Lithuania out.
All the same, she couldn’t discount our experience, either. Her last email to us said:
I feel that my ethics and moral ideals are of a high standard. I would not want to work with an agency that misleads clients. I certainly could never be dishonest with a couple that wants nothing more than to have a child.
See? Proof that there are some ethical people involved in international adoption.
And one more setback for Denise Hubbard in her quest to be the International Adoption Queen of Northeast Ohio. One country that would not have to sully itself by dealing with her.
She may never have known that we were behind keeping her out of Lithuania (well, now she does). But was still her loss.
***
We thought, once again, that it was over. And six weeks later, we got the reminder that were far, far bigger things to worry about than one crooked adoption agency in Ohio one beautiful Tuesday morning, when, after dropping Anguel off at preschool, we returned home only to join the world in watching, in sheer horror, as the World Trade Center towers collapsed on live television after terrorists crashed hijacked jetliners into them.
So, for a while, Building Blocks was sort of beside the point.
But that didn’t last for too long. Before September 2001 was even up, we received word that Denise was trying yet another new angle for a source of prod— uh, children.
On the 26th, Mary Mooney informed us in email that a woman in Ohio had called her and asked about Denise and BBAS, since she had apparently contacted her about starting a program in ... China.
China, the world’s largest sending country for intercountry adoptions, has a plentiful supply of orphans, just like Russia, but that’s about where the similarities end.
For one, the whole system is centralized there. It’s not like Russia where you can just go set up shop in another region if one falls apart on you (as Building Blocks has continued to do). Everything has to go through Beijing.
So, they are a lot less tolerant of misconduct by foreign agencies in placing their children. They can keep track of it much better, and keep you out if they don’t like you.
And you can’t offer as diverse an array of children to your clients as you can in Russia or even Bulgaria. Almost all the children in Chinese orphanages are girls, and (needless to say), they’re all Chinese. No cute blonde blue-eyed ones there.
(If you want to know more about Chinese adoption, the website of Families With Children from China is a good place to start. With more members and more experience in the field, in fact, we’ve found that these people are a bit more attuned to some of the trickier issues of intercountry adoption than their counterparts in the Eastern European adoptive community)
That’s why you wait much longer for a Chinese referral than a Russian one (and incidentally, why, when we started down this road, we opted for Russia over China ... shorter wait for the referral plus we could get a boy. We wouldn’t be lying, though, if we said that along some of the rougher patches of the way we didn’t wish we had gone to China. Or Guatemala).
So, it was a bit comical to us that Denise actually thought she could have a China program (It can take up quite a bit of your resources ... there’s a good reason only the largest agencies have programs in both Russia and China).
Nevertheless, we had to see what the deal was and prepare to warn the right people — all the way to getting our stuff translated into Chinese if we had to.
We got in touch with the woman by email and then I talked with her on the phone.Right off the bat, she didn’t think it was very likely that Denise would ever be placing happy little Chinese girls with clients any time soon. China, she said, was trying to tighten things up (sensitive to strong nationalistic feelings about being the country that shipped out more of its orphans than any other, Russia included) and as such wanted to work only with bigger, established agencies.
So, she had told Denise, if she had wanted to get into China she would have to piggyback on a larger agency. And, as we know, that was not how Denise Hubbard wanted to do things. She didn’t want to be a glorified secretary to someone else (we guess she’d had enough of that with Valeri).
There were a few other interesting details. I learned that Denise had indeed become very fearful of our full-court press on the Internet and its deleterious effect on her business.
“Elizabeth Case is everywhere!” she had told the woman. It was so nice to see our message getting through.
She also told me that Denise, too, had someone else in the adoption world she hated and resented ... Margaret Cole, director of European Adoption Consultants, the well-established agency up the road from her (yes, the woman Denise had claimed to have sued).
Given the complaints she had heard about Ms. Cole and EAC, Denise wondered how she managed to stay in business without being shut down by the state (one of the rare things we could still agree with her on, even now).
The answer, the woman told us, had something to do with Ohio politics. We can’t really go into it here because it involves some assertions we are in no position to prove but are quite scandalous if they are true.
It was the most shocking thing we’d heard about going on on the American side of international adoption, and proves that Russians or Bulgarians or whoever have no monopoly on a lack of scruples where adoption is concerned.
The woman reiterated that despite her warnings, Denise had insisted she could still get into China through some unspecified connections.
It wasn’t going to be hers. And as far as we know, to this day, she’s sometimes promised a future Chinese program to clients in email but has never officially announced one on her website (she is on FCC’s, though, only as a homestudy provider).
Just as well.
A few weeks later we got it in writing from the woman:
Elizabeth,
Hi - after researching a bit I think it is highly unlikely that BBAS
will be working in China. For some time, China has been trying to weed out Agencies. China was hoping to work with just a "few" rather than many so they began making many new and tougher rules and regs to follow. Since the beginning of the weeding out process, China has not accepted any new Agencies - so, BB would have to work with another Agency or not be in China at all
So, we really can’t say that we had the most to do with us, but our role in getting the information out didn’t hurt things.
And at least we didn’t have to pay for a Chinese translation.