The Jones's Cambodian Christmas, 2011

Sandy and Billy at Adoption

Billy Jones (In white T) with Cambodian family, 2011

     In 1994 and 1995, Johnie and Sandy Sampson Jones and their 8 or 9 year old daughter Leslie started acting coy about attending family gatherings.  We had always assembled for Thanksgiving or Christmas. Given, it was expensive and a hassle for them to travel all the way from Anchorage to Oregon during a holiday season, but they had always made it before.  But after they cancelled attendance for a second or third time, they let the cat out of the bag:  they were on stand-by, awaiting a telephone call that would send them to China to adopt a little girl.

     Eventually the call came—but would they mind going to Cambodia instead of to China? The adoption agency had found a healthy little girl. The father had been injured by a land mine, and the family could not afford to keep the baby.  No, they wouldn’t mind, so off they went, via Hong Kong, to Phnom Penh.

They found the orphanage that worked with their adoption agency, and were handed a sedate little baby dressed all in pink, clutching a banana. When they got back to their hotel, Sandy prepared to put a diaper on the baby, who had been handed to them without one. “Johnie, you better come take a look at this!” she said. The little girl was a little boy.

     They telephoned to orphanage.  “What about this pink dress?” Sandy asked.  “In our country, little boys and little girls both wear pink.”

     “What about this baby’s name?” 

     “Well, in our country, both girls and boys use that name.”

     “Well, what about this birth certificate that says the baby is a girl?”

     “Oh, somebody must have made a mistake. Would you mind keeping the baby over the weekend while we look for a girl?”

     They agreed to keep the baby for the time being, but naturally, over the weekend, they bonded.  The baby was so sedate because he was undernourished and hungry.  He had broken an eardrum because of an untreated infection. They completed the adoption under Cambodian law, flew home. At least, because of the hole in his eardrum, the baby didn’t suffer from changes in air pressure as their airplane arose then descended again.    

     In Anchorage, they repeated the whole adoption process under American law.

And William Vake Jones turned out to be such a total delight that two years later, Sandy and Johnie returned to Cambodia to bring home another boy, Mark Richard Jones. Sandy and Johnie have agreed that they really don’t know what they would be doing with their lives if they weren’t so busy bringing up the boys.

      This year, 2011, Sandy and Johnie decided not to celebrate Christmas at home.  Instead, they took the boys to Cambodia to visit the orphanage they came from, to reunite with Billy’s birth family, to renew the boys’ Cambodian passports (they have dual citizenship), and to see Angkor Watt. Leslie flew from her outpost in Shanghai to join them.  Leslie has posted a few photos on her website, Undersundog.com, and Ricky has posted a note on his Facebook page. We will have to await the whole “book report” from them.