Community Notebook > Our Community, Our News
The Children’s Crusade:
Adopting Cambodian Children
by Jay Blotcher; photo by Dion Ogust

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TIt took Fred Waring 15 months of battling red tape, coping with frustrating delays, and two flights across the globe before he was allowed to adopt a small, wide-eyed girl named Chantrea from a primitive, disease-ridden orphanage in Cambodia and bring her home.

But for Waring, 44, a West Shokan resident, the mission is not finished. He will return in January to Boray Orphanage with two gifts: running water and electricity. A builder with two decades experience and his own company, Prime Contracting, Waring has been collecting donated materials for months so that he may dig a well, build baths, toilets, and sinks, and install solar panels at the orphanage. He is supported by one Cambodian organization that sees adoption as the only hope for these impoverished children. But there is equal resistance from a nationalist group that wants orphans to remain on home soil.
Waring and his wife Tracey had planned some time ago to adopt from Cambodia, where, as in most Asian countries, female children have little value. The Warings were approved to adopt an eight-month-old girl, whose parents had been killed in an auto accident. But last December, the ins, acting on news about a black market baby operation in Cambodia, immediately halted all adoptions. Some 400 approved American families, who had already begun bonding with photos of their prospective children, were left in limbo.

Representative Maurice Hinchey wrote to the ins commissioner on behalf of the Warings and two other couples caught in the bureaucratic stalemate—Sharon and Colin Berry of New Paltz and Karen and Richard Van Denburg of Ulster Park—stressing that all three families had been at least informally matched to Cambodian children and were well along in the adoption process before the suspension. The ins was ultimately persuaded to complete the adoptions and in late October, Waring brought home Chantrea, now 23 months old and renamed Violet.

Violet has acclimated quickly to both six-year-old sister Jade and her new surroundings. She has learned several English words. “It’s pretty amazing how resilient kids are, after what she’s been through,” Tracey said.

“There is a part of me that feels I’ve known her forever,” she continued. “Her face is completely familiar to me.” Similarly, Fred Waring is haunted by the faces of the children he left behind.
Boray Orphanage, four hours outside of Phnom Penh in Kompong Thom province, can only be reached by boat. It is a modest concrete structure where 170 children live and sleep in close quarters and share the modest amount of food they receive. When Waring arrived for the first time last March, he had to step over the numerous people begging in the streets around the orphanage. “They had no medicine,” Waring recalled. “Malaria was pretty bad. So many different things were happening because the money wasn’t coming through from the adoptions.” Notified in advance of his visit of horrendous living conditions, Waring had gathered donations from Kingston-area merchants. He brought medication to ease asthma and scabies, donated by Apria Health Care. School supplies were provided by the Parent Teacher’s Store in Kingston, and a case of Fruit Strips from Mother Earth’s natural food store.

Waring also brought thousands of dollars he had gathered in donations. Accompanied by Soung “Sonny” Santetheap, a facilitator with the Cambodian-based Society for Orphanage Support (sos), Waring shopped the marketplace in Phnom Penh, and distributed clothes and hundreds of pairs of shoes to the children of Boray.

Sonny was grateful, but warned Waring that another Cambodian organization would not look kindly upon his efforts. Children of Asia (aspeca)—with links to French colonists and the French Foreign Office—opposes all adoptions that take children out of the country and, they believe, strips them of their cultural heritage. Since 1992, aspeca has built six homes for abandoned and orphaned children, and sends them to school. (For more information on aspeca, see http://membres.lycos.fr/aspeca/actcamuk.html.) According to Sonny, aspeca makes orphans wards of the state, forcing them to remain in impoverished Cambodia.

Since the ban on adoptions continues in Cambodia, orphanages are severely overcrowded. Investigations have yielded no proof of widespread corruption, but there is no talk of lifting the ban soon. Therefore, meager resources at Boray have been taxed to the limit.
In addition to plans for modernizing Boray, Waring will help Sonny as he builds another orphanage, 20 miles outside of Phnom Penh. The new structure will ease the overcrowding and disease of the state-run orphanages. By running its own orphanage, sos also hopes to prevent aspeca from intervening in foreign adoptions when they resume.

Waring traces his humanitarianism and concern about Asian orphans back two decades. He was on Martha’s Vineyard, fixing the house of Mia Farrow. Waring had the chance to know the several children she had adopted. “I guess I never forgot that,” he said.

Leery of corruption in large charities, Waring cut out the middleman: he took to standing on Manhattan street corners, handing out money to the poor. “I thought there would be a day when I could do something myself.”

Waring almost had the chance to do even more, but he missed out on the family fortune. He is the grandson and namesake of the big band leader and blender inventor. However, bad blood between his father and grandfather, he said, saw his side cut out of the patriarch’s will.
Waring has secured a promise from the Cambodian officials that all duties tax will be waived on the building materials he brings in January. In the meantime, he continues to gather donations.