CHICHAGOBREAKINGNEWS.COM
When Candice Warltier landed in Kathmandu almost three months ago, she only expected to be there a short time as
- Candice Warltier and her daughter, Antara, have been stranded in Nepal because of a change in adoption rules. (Family photo)
As it turned out, the Chicago woman stayed much longer, held up by an investigation by the U.S. State Department, which had recently changed its policy toward adoptions from Nepal.
But today U.S. embassy officials in Kathmandu gave her the happy news. The investigation was done, and they could return home to Chicago.
“My daughter and I are coming home,” she said in an interview from her apartment in Kathmandu.
By the time she arrived on Aug. 7, Warltier had already spent a year and a half working through the bureaucratic requirements of the adoption.
But because of a change in U.S. immigration policy while Warltier was in route, Antara couldn’t be granted a visa to leave the country without further U.S. investigation. Nepal’s adoption system has been plagued by abuse — kidnappings, fake documents — and while she was en route, the U.S. government changed its procedures, hoping to make sure abandoned children really were abandoned.
Warltier, who writes a blog on the Tribune’s ChicagoNow network and whose story was the subject of a Tribune column last month, was sure that Antara had been abandoned. Her daughter lived at an orphanage for since she was days old and no one had visited her, the girl’s caretakers had told her.
They lived in a hotel until the cumulative expense got to be too much and then moved into an apartment with a woman from Boston and her 4-year-old daughter, who were in the same predicament, Warltier said.
Five other U.S. families are in the same limbo over Nepal adoptions, including two other families from Illinois. Warltier’s file was the first approved among their group.
The families have built a close bond with each other during their time in the Himalayan capital, learning together about their children’s native land and culture, and Warltier said her happiness was tempered, knowing that the other families wait would continue.
“I don’t know why mine was approved and others haven’t,” she said. “They may see this as hope that more files will be approved.”
Mother and daughter aren’t home-free yet, however. Warltier has been been granted a visa, but won’t receive it until next week, and she must wait for the girl’s original birth certificate to be mailed back to her from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in New Delhi.
She isn’t certain how long the remaining steps will take, though at a meeting today with embassy officials, Warltier gave them a deadline.
“I told them, ‘I have a flight booked for Nov. 4. I really want to be on that flight.”
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