"I just want to bring my daughter home"

Meagan Paterson is talking to me in a café in Torquay, her face drawn and eyes downcast. She is approximately 7000 kilometres away from her five-year-old daughter Pisey, who is waiting patiently in a Cambodian rape shelter for the Australian Immigration Minister to decide if she can join her family here.

Meagan gives me dates, anecdotes, statistics. She tells me names, lists Government departments and relays conversations had during migration review hearings. She cries. She tells me she misses her little girl.

Meagan and Michael Paterson’s fraught adoption journey began in Cambodia more than three years ago when they lived in Cambodia as expatriates and worked at Ptea Teuk Dong, a rape and homelessness crisis centre, in Battambang Province, Cambodia. The Paterson’s met Pisey when she was 18 months old. Her mum had been raped and sought crisis accommodation at the centre. Meagan and Michel fell in love with the happy, outgoing toddler and when her mother decided to move back to her village without Pisey, the Paterson’s decided to adopt her.

“We didn’t realise then what a rollercoaster it would be,” Meagan says.

“We always expected it would be a complicated process, especially from the Cambodian side, but certainly not the level of difficulty we have faced from the Australian Government.”

Meagan and Michael’s troubles began when they heard Meagan’s dad, Bill, had been diagnosed with cancer. The couple sought the advice of the Australian consulate in Cambodia, who assured them that if they returned home without Pisey, the Australian Government would be able to award Pisey a visa to join her family here on compassionate grounds.

“The advice was wrong,” Meagan says.

“We didn’t know it at the time but we were going outside legal parameters and we found out once we back here that the Australian Government would not award the visa unless we lodged the application from Cambodia, which would prove in the Government’s eyes that we were genuinely living as expatriates.”

Inter-country adoption is a vexed issue in Australia, with the stories filtering through to the media involving celebrities like Madonna or Angelina Jolie whose speedy and apparently easy adoptions in no way represent the experiences of thousands of couples in Australia who wait silently and patiently on waiting lists for up to a decade.

UNICEF estimates that there are around 145 million orphans in the world, and in 2008, 270 of these children were placed with Australia families, compared with 17,438 in the USA.

UNICEF statistics show for every six children adopted in the United States, just one child will find a family in Australia.

Australia’s approach to inter-country adoption is informed by the Hague Convention on Inter-Country Adoption, to which it became a signatory in 1987. At its core, the Convention dictates that children must be adopted to families overseas only if every other option has been exhausted for them in their country of birth and that they are available for adoption through legitimate means and have not been stolen or trafficked.

For prospective adoptive parents, the process of inter-country adoption in Australia is long, expensive and emotionally taxing. Prospective parents must submit to a litany of health and background checks and agree not to have a child biologically.

The process is dictated by a different set of rules, guidelines and requirements in each state, and is very broadly overseen by the Department of the Attorney-General.

Australia currently has inter-country adoption programs established in fourteen countries- of which Cambodia is not one.

In 2005 an Overseas Adoption in Australia report produced a list of 27 recommendations intended to harmonise the process of inter-country adoption between states. To date, there have been few changes made beyond the establishment of various committees by the Attorney-General. There have been no changes made to legislation, and no new programs established overseas.

Meagan shakes her head.

“You know, through all of this, all the hearings, meetings with the embassy, appointments and everything else, not once has anyone actually asked how Pisey is, how she is coping living apart from her family and not knowing when she is going to see us again.

“She is not just a case number. She is a person with her whole life ahead of her and all I want is to help her fulfill a destiny that is more than she would have if she stayed in Cambodia without a family.”

The Patersons, who have three teenaged children, are now waiting for their last hope- direct intervention in the case from the Minister for Immigration, Chris Bowen.

Having exhausted the capacity of the law in their attempt to secure Pisey’s visa, Mr Bowen now holds the outcome in his hands. It is he who will decide if Pisey can join her family in Torquay.

Meagan has garnered hundreds of supporters for the family’s cause through a Facebook page, with friends and family leaving comments and promising to rally the Minister ahead of a meeting with the Patersons next week.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking of the hundreds of proclamations of support is a comment left on the page by Meagan and Michael’s daughter, Millie.

“I miss you terribly Pisey,” she wrote. “Sisters can’t be separated especially all the way around the world…. Please come my room is open and so is my heart ready for the little bubba sister I never had”.

“We just hope and pray that Pisey is home by Christmas,” Meagan says.

“What else can we do but wait?”

UPDATE November 17: Last Monday, Immigration Minister Chris Bowen awarded Pisey her visa. Meagan and Michael this week fly to Cambodia to, at long last, bring their little girl home.

This post first appeared on Amelia’s blog here and has been reprinted with full permission

Amelia is a former News Limited journalist who now freelances and writes her blog, Musings of the Media Obsessed (www.ameliaalisoun.wordpress.com). She is passionate about issues that affect women and the community. You can follow her on Twitter @ameliaalisoun.