Every couple of weeks, Coupeville residents Janelle and Sean Parrick open their mailbox to what has become the most important mail of their life.

Tucked inside an envelope is a small note and a handful of pictures of a 13-month-old Haitian girl named Shynda.

The husband and wife are parents to three children, Emma, age 4; Clayton, age 7; and Austin, age 9. But earlier this year they decided they wanted another child in the family. They are hoping that child will be Shynda.

“We just felt God was leading us to adopt,” Jannelle said.

In January their attempt to adopt a child from San Salvador was stopped midprocess by governmental restrictions in that country that kept any children from leaving. Upset, but not discouraged to adopt, the Parricks began to talk to friends who had successful adoption experiences with a woman named Barbara.

That woman was Barbara Walker, head of the nonprofit organization Reach Out to Haiti. Based in Port-au-Prince, the organization coordinates adoptions of Haitian children and provides humanitarian aid to Haitian children and women. Currently, the organization focuses 90 percent of its time on adoptions.

Walker said that by the end of the year she and her volunteer staff will have found new homes for 500 Haitian children during the program’s five-year existence. Already this year, 22 children have been sent to homes in the U.S.

It was a chance to meet one of those new arrivals — Goss Lake residents Bryan and Onica Nichols’ 1-year-old daughter Josie — that confirmed with the Parricks they should follow a chance to adopt a Haitian child.

Prior to this year, the Nichols had already adopted children, so when Onica Nichols called Walker in August and learned about Reach Out to Haiti’s adoption process, it sounded too good to be true. But for the Nichols family, it wasn’t.

Last October, Walker told the Nichols’ about Josie, who was brought to the staff of Reach Out to Haiti when she was only six days old.

“Bryan had been wanting a girl, so when we heard about a baby girl we immediately knew we wanted her,” Onica said.

However, Josie was too young for the staff to accept her, and too reliant on the nutrition of her mother’s breast milk. So, Barbara told the mother to bring the child back in three weeks. It was a daring move, considering a high percentage of newborns in Haiti die due to malnutrition and neglect.

“When Barbara told me she let her go and that she’d be coming back in a few weeks I thought, ‘No, bring her back,’ and was on edge the whole time,” said Onica Nichols. “I called the day she was to be back and she was there. I was so thankful.”

The Nichols flew to Haiti last November. They spent six days touring the village where Josie was born, meeting her family, visiting Haitian schools, and touring parts of Haiti not frequented by tourists.

“We really wanted to see where she lived and what it’s like for kids in Haiti,” Nichols said.

But this wasn’t the trip home for Josie. The Nichols adoption dossier slowly made its way through the hands of Haitian officials, and it wasn’t until February that they gave the Nichols adoption approval. Even when the adoption was finalized, Josie remained in Haiti.

“They weren’t issuing Barbara anymore travel permits, so we booked tickets on a Thursday and flew out that Saturday for Haiti,” Nichols said. “We were barely off the plane, picked up Josie and were back on again heading home.”

They were given all of Josie’s background information, pictures of her four biological siblings, and her birth certificate.

“We were really given a roadmap to her family if she want to find them some day,” Onica said. “In fact, they insist the birth parents keep in touch with the kids.”

Not to worry — tracking family roots is already important to the Nichols’. Their 10-year-old daughter Lyna came to them from Cambodia when she was 5. They have an open adoption with their son Elijah’s mother in Seattle. Elijah, now 7, joined the family when the Nichols’ biological son, 9-year-old Hayden, was just 15 months old.

More children coming to Whidbey

Even though it took seven months for the Nichols, their adoption could be considered quick. Not all Haitian adoptions go so smoothly.

“Haitian adoptions are complicated by paperwork requirements of the Haitian government and its lack of organization,” said Walker while on a visit to Whidbey Island last weekend.

Certificates of birth, required for adoption, are hard to come by in Haiti. But despite governmental and documentation setbacks, Walker predicts 10 to 20 more Haitian children will come to the U.S. before the end of the year. In addition to Shynda, at least three more children are heading to Whidbey.

Deb Lund and Karl Olsen of Greenbank are waiting for their children, brother and sister Sandra, 5, and Jean Waldy, 2. The couple just started the adoption process in June, but are optimistic of the wait time ahead.

“Right now we’re just studying a lot about Haiti, listening to their music, reading childrens’ book and can’t wait for them to be here,” Lund said.

Like many Reach Out to Haiti adopting parents before them, Olsen and Lund plan to travel to Haiti to pickup Sandra and Jean.

“I want to see, hear and smell what it’s like to wake up in their country,” Olsen said.

Five-year-old Alex will soon be arriving at the home of Amy and Robert Martin of Coupeville. At a Reach Out to Haiti gathering last Saturday on South Whidbey, Martin proudly wore a button bearing Alex’s picture.

“We might get to go see him in a couple of weeks,” she said.

The couple has been in the last stage of the adoption process for three months, and is anxious to bring Alex home to meet his new brother and sister, 6-year-old Nathaniel and 4-year-old Caroline.

In the meantime, gatherings with fellow Reach Out to Haiti parents and cooking nights with Haitian native Lovia Neptune of Oak Harbor keep her mind off the delay. She’s not alone in waiting.

Shynda, the child adopted by the Parricks, is currently in a foster home in the Haitian village of Carre Four. They hope to have her home for Christmas.

“It could be a month, it could be more,” she said. “It’s hard to have to wait again.”

It is also uncertain how long Lund and Olsen will have to wait. Walker said the Bush administration has made foreign adoptions more difficult in the past three years. Haitian adoptions had a steady flow through the 1990s until 1998, when the INS and Haitian social services began to to cutdown the availability of adoption.

At the moment, according to Walker, there is no better solution for Haitian children than to get the children out of Haiti.

“There’s no doubt that adoption is the right thing for these kids. It gives them a chance to escape a country that’s full of anger,” she said. “In America Haitian children have the opportunities to utilize the intelligence they have instead of letting it go to waste.”

Walker still has a home in the upstate New York city of Melrose, but rarely sees it as she now mostly lives in Haiti.

“I can’t leave Haiti often,” she said. “Whenever I do, babies die.”

Walker finds the families’ desire to keep in touch and maintain a local Haitian community link as positive.

“They’ll be there for each other, both to protect each other from making the same mistakes during the adoption process and to keep their children’s culture alive,” she said.