One Scottsdale family has an extra holiday on their calendar. August 26th is “Family Day” and it will be “the most important day of the year for us for the rest of our lives,” says Craig Juntunen.

On that date three years ago, Craig and his wife Kathi brought their three newly adopted children—Amelec, Esperancia and Quinn—to America from Haiti. The children had been living in an orphanage near Port-au-Prince, in a filthy, poverty-stricken, densely populated and violent slum where murders and kidnappings are a daily occurrence and hundreds of thousands of kids are starving.

Craig describes the transition his children underwent from life in a Haitian orphanage to life in a Scottsdale home as though “they were beamed up from a very primitive environment.”

“They never had electricity or hot or cold running water,” he says. “They had never tasted Coca-Cola, ice or ice cream and had never seen television or a car with seat belts.”

Kathi was surprised when she noticed that her kids didn’t know how to get out toys and play. “They had never done imaginary play, like lining up chairs to make an airplane,” she says. “They also didn’t have any of their own clothing.”

Three years later, Esperancia wears a darling pink-and-brown dress and her brothers sport collared, button-down shirts for their 2009 “Family Day” dinner, which takes place on the pretty outdoor patio of a local restaurant.

“Happy Family Day,” Craig and Kathi say to each of their children, smiling at them and clicking their beverage glasses. Eight-year old Amelec’s entire face lights up with a charismatic smile. “I love my family,” he says.

Eight-year old Esperancia, who is called Espie, casts her eyes down to focus on her words. “I love going to the park, bike riding and having dinner with my family,” she says.

Kathi looks at Amelec and Espie. “They still remember their life in the orphanage,” she says.

Four-year old Quinn was a baby when he came to Arizona. He shows his love for everyone at the table by saying each family member’s name (adding theirdog Buster to the mix) and mentioning Craig, whom he calls “Poppa,” twice.

Craig’s eyes tear up when he remembers first seeing Quinn, then a small, undernourished baby propped up in the corner of a run-down Haitian building. “I was thinking he wouldn’t live much longer; he looked very frail and very pale,” Craig recalls. No one knew how old Quinn was because he had been abandoned on a doorstep.  

An unexpected direction

The road to parenthood was unexpected for Craig and Kathi. The couple had firmly decided, before they were married, that they did not want children. A successful businessman, Craig retired in his 40s. He and Kathi were able to buy lovely homes, enjoy world travel and go to cocktail parties.

“We thought we were going to live the retirement life of country clubs, golfing, skiing and travel, and we did that for about five years,” explains Craig.
But four years ago, when a new acquaintance, Rick Federico, asked Craig to join him in a round of golf, the seeds for a personal transformation were sown. As the two made their way around the golf course, Rick told Craig about how he and his wife Peggy had first raised three boys, then adopted two girls from Haiti.

“Why Haiti?” Craig asked.

Rick revealed some startling facts. Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world. It has an orphan epidemic, and three out of five children there die before age 5.

Craig realized he didn’t even know where Haiti was on the map, but he told Kathi what he’d learned. As the couple talked, they felt a tug on their hearts. Before they knew it, they’d decided to adopt two children from a Haitian orphanage called Crèche de l’Enfant Jesus, in the village of Ti Mache, near Port-Au-Prince.

Unsure how safe a trip to the Third World country might be, Craig made the first trip to Haiti without Kathi. It was a fierce introduction that compelled him to change his life. “It is the image of children without any hope of a future,” says Craig. “These children in the village in Port-Au-Prince and other cities I visited [are] standing by the side of the road with little or no clothing, no shoes and their bellies protruding because they are starving to death.”

A couple of months later, when the couple went to Haiti together, Kathi was struck by something she saw: a Haitian woman making mud pies to feed her children. “If my children are going to die of starvation and hunger, I’d rather they die on full stomachs,” the woman told Kathi. She also saw how difficult life is when everything has to be done by hand. “There are no washers to put your baby’s diapers in, and there are no stoves, so they cook everything on hot coals,” she says. “People who have seen Mexico may think they’ve seen poverty, but they haven’t seen poverty until they’ve seen a place like this.”

The Crèche orphanage was a bright light in such a dismal place. And it was where Amelec and Esperancia were living when the Juntunens decided to adopt them. But becoming the parents of two children no longer seemed right after Craig saw baby Quinn in such dire need. They began the process of bringing him into their family, too.

Even that wasn’t enough. When they heard that Crèche was struggling financially, they donated funds to keep it operating. Then they formed Chances for Children (chances4children.org), a non-profit organization that runs Crèche and does outreach work with local groups to improve life for all villagers by doing things like providing better drinking water and building a school.

“If we can help some of the kids be mentally stimulated, hopefully they will find a way out of the poverty,” notes Kathi. “Not all these kids are going to get adopted but at least they have some hope now.”

Chances for Children also works with families and adoption agencies, guiding the placement process for Crèche children into loving homes. “When I take families to meet their children for the first time, you can’t even express the feeling,” says Kathi.

Melissa and Seth Holdaway from Pleasant Grove, Utah, adopted their 6-year old son Lucio and their 5-year old daughter Alyvia with the help of Chances for Children. “Adopting both of our children was the best thing we ever did.” she says.

Melissa explains how her kids were each brought to Crèche by parents who were so destitute they couldn’t afford to take care of them. “Alyvia was very, very sick and I think she was starving,” Melissa says.

Going to Haiti was a real eye-opener that gave her an understanding of her son’s and daughter’s roots. “It is like going back in time, almost like Bible times where homes are made from mud and straw and there is maybe a sheet on top of them and that’s where people live,” she says.

Craig is currently focused on increasing awareness about what he describes as “a crisis” with the international adoption process.

“International adoptions are declining because it has become far too expensive and foreign governments and special interest groups have made adoption requirements too complicated,” says Craig, who wrote a book,  Both Ends Burning: My Story of Adopting Three Children from Haiti, detailing the last few years of his life. “You have families who would love to adopt a child but because of cost and time constraints they can’t do it, and on the other hand you have millions of orphaned and abandoned children who would love to be paired with a loving family and we cannot easily bring them together,” he says.

Rick Federico says it warms his heart to see all the Juntunens have done since the golf outing four years ago. His daughters, Maddie and Shea, are now young teenagers his wife describes as “wonderfully adjusted girls.”

“Our original thought was that we just had an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of two kids from Haiti and that was it,” says Rick. “But now we see how that decision played forward to have an impact on Craig and Kathi, and then how their work played forward to make a difference with hundreds of kids—and now you can even play it forward again to see what they are doing with international adoption awareness that could affect thousands of kids.”

In the Juntunen’s home office, framed photos show Craig’s athletic career (which culminated when he quarterbacked in the Canadian football league) and many of the great times he and Kathi shared traveling the world. There is also a framed sentence that reads, “You can’t become what you want to be by remaining who you are.” For Craig and Kathi, loving parents is what they now are. “We went from easy street to chaotic street overnight,” says Craig, laughing.

“When people see a family like ours and hear what we have done they say, ‘that’s cool and it’s also unusual,’” says Craig. “We want to make it more usual.”

“They’re great kids and are doing so well that it makes me appreciate the opportunity we all got—them and us,” says Kathi. “We would much rather be doing what we are doing than going to a cocktail party or hanging out. They have totally changed our lives for the better.”

Watch this story on 12News

Each Monday 5pm 12News broadcast features a segment from Raising Arizona Kids magazine, hosted by anchor, reporter and mother of four Lin Sue Cooney and co-produced with our own staff writer/producer Vicki Louk Balint. 

• Watch Raising Arizona Kids on 12News.
• Read Vicki's blog post about interviewing the Juntunen family in their home.

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Publisher & Editor Karen Barr's blog includes a post-earthquake update from the Juntunen family: Haiti tragedy hits close to home.