Marshall Islands

A MOTHER takes $300 in spending money and gives up her baby, not understanding that the child is lost to her for good. Another says an adoption agent told her she would shame her family if she didn't go through with the adoption. Luckily for the second mother, the adopting family saw her pain and sent her and her baby back home together. But many adoption stories of babies conceived in the Marshall Islands hold mischief and pain for both sides, as The Sun's Walter F. Roche Jr. reported Sunday and Monday.

DAYTON, Ohio - Emily rode her plastic pony as Hannah, her younger, shyer sister, tested the patience of Annie, the family dog. Brandon needed a ride to work. An average day for the Bulldis family, though not an average family. Maryann, known on the Internet as "Maxed out Mom," and John Bulldis, both 40, are parents to four biological children, including Brandon, 14, and two adopted sisters, Emily and Hannah. The family - John is a major in the Air Force - recently moved from Germany to his new assignment at nearby Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

For Valerie Shefik, the effort to adopt a second Marshallese child led to what she calls one of the most heart-wrenching experiences of her life. Valerie, 44, and her husband, Robert, 46, first adopted a Marshallese child in late 1997 through the TLC Adoption Agency in Washington state. The boy's adoption was approved by the Arizona courts and went smoothly. Nearly three years later, the Scottsdale, Ariz., couple were exploring the possibility of another adoption when Valerie Shefik got a call from TLC around Thanksgiving, telling her that a 7-year-old Marshallese girl "had to be placed quickly."

SARASOTA, Fla. - For two families in Florida, the pain of an adoption gone wrong is plainly visible on their faces. Carmen and Darlene Scoma talk sadly about the child from the Marshall Islands they thought they had legally claimed in Hawaii in 1997. For 4 1/2 years, Atina Erakdrik had been their daughter, until they lost her early last year after a bitter court battle. "She's our daughter. She will always be our daughter," says Darlene Scoma, her voice quavering. In Fruitland Park, 130 miles north, Atina's birth mother, Molly Juna, 31, who traveled more than 7,000 miles to reclaim her child, talks about the pain she endured during the protracted court fight.

MAJURO, Marshall Islands -- A half-dozen people, birth mothers and baby sitters, sat on couches or on the floor in a modern house, holding gurgling newborns destined for adoption by American couples. Some of the infants already had been matched with American parents. Among them was Rosita Lamgrin, 21, who had just given birth to her fifth child, the first she'd decided to give up for adoption. In a nearby bedroom, another mother was changing a diaper. Cuddling a soon-to-be adopted baby was Lina Morris, operator of the Pacific Children Adoption Agency, who pioneered the Marshall Islands to Hawaii commerce in mothers and their newborns.

MAJURO, Marshall Islands - With four young children and a fifth on the way, a visibly pregnant Neji Johnny was an easy target for a recruiter for Adoption Choices, an American agency that scours the poverty-scarred streets of this remote Western Pacific atoll on the lookout for mothers willing to give up their babies. In return for $300 in spending money, Johnny said she agreed to fly to Hawaii. As a resident of a former U.S. trust territory, she could travel without a visa. The adoption agency put her up at the rambling Moanalua Hillside Apartments in Honolulu with about 20 other expectant mothers from the Marshalls.

EBEYE, Marshall Islands - Playing in the streets, diving from rusted hulks of wrecked Navy ships into crystal-blue water, swinging makeshift bats in a game of baseball on dirt lots, doing back-flips from the remains of a mattress, the children are everywhere. The Marshall Islands' fertility rate of 6.5 children per woman, defined as the number of children a woman can be expected to bear in her lifetime, is among the highest in the world. It is more than triple the U.S. figure of 2.1, which equals the replacement rate that demographers say keeps a country's population stable when factors such as emigration are not counted.

An aid package for two Pacific Island nations that would provide more than $3.5 billion in funding over 20 years and ensure first-time protection for island workers recruited to work in low-paying jobs in the United States was approved by the House yesterday in a voice vote. The measure, which still must be acted on by the Senate, would extend and amend the Compact of Free Association, a 1986 agreement between the United States and the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia.

A $6.6 billion combined aid package for Micronesia and the Marshall Islands won't keep pace with inflation during the next 20 years and will ultimately produce a substantial cut in the per capita aid to the two impoverished nations, a U.S. General Acounting Office official testified yesterday. Susan S. Westin, the GAO's managing director of international affairs and trade, told the House subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific that an analysis of the proposed aid packages negotiated with the two countries as part of a revised Compact of Free Association shows that even with the creation of trust funds, the countries will face substantial cuts.

WASHINGTON - In their first public, face-to-face confrontation with U.S. officials, a small group of landowners from a Pacific Ocean atoll vowed yesterday to block a lease renewal agreement for a missile range that is vital for tests of the Bush administration's new anti-ballistic missile system. The landowners from Kwajalein, part of the Marshall Islands, told congressmen, staffers and U.S. State Department officials that the plan negotiated with the island government to extend the lease on the Ronald Reagan Missile Range until 2066 was unfair.