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Woman Widowed by Bridge Collapse Adopts Haitian Twins
Their lives were touched by tragedy separately. Together, they hope to heal.
Betsy Sathers lost her husband, Scott, in 2007, when a Minneapolis bridge collapsed and fell into the Mississippi River.
Betsy said in an interview reported by the Associated Press that she mourned twice — once for her husband, and again for the family that she thought they would raise together.
Late last month, Sathers brought home her new family — two-year-old twins, adopted from Haiti.
The twins had suffered through not only whatever difficulty brought them to the Haitian orphanage in the first place, but also through the devastating earthquake on January 12.
Though all 45 children in their orphanage survived the quake, the building was in ruins. Sathers was completely in the dark, not knowing what had happened to her kids.
And then fate stepped again. Rob Kramer, chairman and co-founder of Global Water Trust, was in the country helping to process Haitian orphans being adopted to move them out of the country quickly. He got an email on his cell phone about Sathers’ children.
In a van behind his car was another adoption worker, also helping to move adopted children. She’d just left the twins’ orphanage. When Kramer showed her the email, both were shocked to discover the twins were already in her van with her.
The group headed for the U.S. Embassy, and Sathers and the twins were reunited on January 22.
The new mom says there’s still so much help needed in Haiti, but that she feels like she and her twins got their happy ending. “I don’t think I rescued them,” she said. “I feel like if anything, they’ve rescued me.”
Photo: DVIDSHUB, Flickr
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