Haymarket pastor, wife bringing home a future son from Haiti

Larry and Liz Warren met their son, Sterly, in July.

The couple was on a mission trip to Haiti with the Haymarket-based group Helping Haitian Angels.

"We met Sterly's mom, who is just a teenager, and she wanted to see her child go to a good home," said Larry Warren, a pastor at Park Valley Church in Haymarket.

And the Warrens, who had been trying for more than 12 years to have a child of their own, wanted to give him that home, Larry Warren said.

So the Warrenton couple started filing the necessary paperwork to adopt Sterly.

"Everything was moving along really good," Warren said.

But then came the earthquake.

The 7.0 quake that hit Haiti on Jan. 12 toppled some government buildings, where the adoption paperwork was stored.

And the Warrens feared for the safety of Sterly, now 1, who was living in Port-au-Prince.

Liz Warren had already planned to travel to Haiti on a mission trip with Helping Haitian Angels this month. After the earthquake, their friends raised money so that Larry Warren could travel there too.

The couple's new mission became to find Sterly and try to bring him home, Larry Warren said.

"We got here on Sunday and everything has been a blur since then," Warren said, speaking from a hotel in Haiti on Thursday.

"We've been in the hotel lobby almost since we got here, working frantically talking to different branches of government and just trying to get all of the paperwork together," he said.

The Warrens have sent faxes and e-mails and phone calls to everyone from their friends back home to members of Congress to Geraldo Rivera this week, trying to get all of the paperwork and the help they need to finalize their adoption.

Everything started to fall into place Thursday, Warren said.

"Early in the process, it was frustrating," he said. "But everything seems to be working out now."

The couple planned to go to Port-au-Prince to pick up Sterly, his paperwork and their lawyer Friday.

Their next stop is the U.S. Embassy, where they will present all of their paperwork and try to get a visa for Sterly.

"We can't wait to see him," Warren said. "This whole week we've been up late and up early in the morning, too excited to sleep. We're very excited and a little bit worried."

The Warrens are one of thousands of American families attempting to finalize adoptions of Haitian children after the earthquake.

This week the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced it would grant humanitarian parole to thousands of Haitian orphans who were deemed eligible for adoption before the earthquake.

The United Nations Children's Fund estimated that before the earthquake there were 380,000 children living in orphanages in Haiti.

After the earthquake, aid groups are estimating that tens of thousands more children were orphaned, according to the Associated Press.

The Warrens said they hope that their success means that other families will be able to bring their adopted children home too.

"We hope to bring Sterly home and we hope we can pave the way for all of the other families waiting to bring their kids home," Larry Warren said.

The Warrens are with a group of about 30 volunteers from Helping Haitian Angels who have spent the past week in Haiti. The volunteers have completed projects at the orphanage they operate in Cap Haitien and offered some help to victims of the earthquake.

The group planned to return to Virginia on Saturday.

For more information about the group, visit helpinghaitianangels.org.

Staff writer Amanda Stewart can be reached at 703-878-8014.