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AREA FAMILY HAS TIES TO HAITI
Monday, January 18th, 2010 -- 12:17 pm
Posted by Riley Hebert-News Director
The earthquake in Haiti has hit home for a Marshfield family.
Stephanie and Jeff Salzwedel, both Granton graduates, were in the process of adopting a girl from that poverty-stricken country. The 2-year-old girl’s name was Anchife (ahn-CHIEF). Stephanie had traveled to an orphanage just outside of Port-au-Prince and spent a week with the girl, but the adoption fell through last year when her birth mother decided she didn’t want to give her up.
While the earthquake has been devastating, conditions in the country weren’t very good before.
"It's devastating, but, everyone talks about how there's rubble everywhere... it kind of looked like that when I was there, only now, it's magnified 1,000 times," Stephanie says. "They talk about how they don't have electricity and water. They didn't have those things then."
Stephanie says the people of Haiti have an old Creole saying: Degage’. In their culture it means ‘make do with what you have’ – she’s sure that’s just what the people there will do during and after the recovery.
"I think they appreciate what they have, although they have very little. It's a different mindset of what we have here," she explains.
News of the earthquake has been hard to take. They’ve been trying to track down information about Anchife, but at this point, they don’t even know if she survived.
"It was hard to hear. It's personal for me. It's not just some random people I see on the screen and can turn off. I have people that I love there," she says.
If there’s a silver-lining to all this, she says the bureaucracy that made their adoption process such a long, drawn-out experience has been eased after the earthquake. She learned Monday morning that 26 children in the orphanage Anchife was from were cleared to fly to their adoptive US homes as soon as possible.
The Salzwedel’s have three children of their own, and have adopted a child from Ghana.
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