Canadians stranded abroad while adopting daughter

Little Zoe Muth is the luckiest girl in the world! At 21 months old, with sickle cell anemia she was adopted from an orphanage in Nigeria by our dear friends Emilie and Derek Muth. Adoption had always been how they wanted to start their family and they spent a lot of time researching, planning and saving up to make it happen. The reason they chose international adoption was at the advice of domestic adoption agencies who said it would be a 6-8 year wait for a child to fit their profile. The primary focus of the Muth’s was “to provide a home to a child who was unlikely to be placed domestically and therefore would have stayed in the orphanage indefinitely.” Emilie previously worked as a pediatric nurse and when they were matched with Zoe it seemed as if it was meant to be; a match made in heaven.

The adoption was completed in October 2019 in Nigeria and the application for a travel visa to Canada for Zoe was sent in November to the Canadian Immigration office in Ghana.  In the meantime Zoe fell critically sick with sepsis and anemia. She was able to improve with a blood transfusion from Derek but then they both caught malaria. They were advised to travel to Barbados by Drs in Nigeria to be able to get better medical care while they waited for the visa to be approved. There are limited countries that will let both Canadian and Nigerian citizens stay without visas.  Barbados is one of them. Then Covid 19 hit. Most of the Canadian immigration staff was repatriated back to Canada from Ghana leaving only a skeleton staff in an office that is already notoriously slow as they process all the applications from West Africa. Since then they’ve heard nothing.

International adoption is already expensive but they’d planned for that. They hadn’t planned for a pandemic which has made it difficult to secure the correct medications for Zoe, left their application in limbo in Ghana and drained them of almost $70K in extra expenses. The monthly expenses are around $5000 and they don’t know how much longer they will be stranded. On top of that Derek may have to return to work as his leave is coming to an end and Emilie will have to be alone in a country where they don’t have any family or friends. Or worse still may have to go back to Nigeria if Barbados doesn’t extend their stay.

They say “it takes a village to raise a child”. Their village is back here in Calgary. Please consider helping to lighten the financial stress they are under by making a donation to cover ongoing/previous out of country costs. Respectful advocacy on behalf of Emilie and Derek is also welcomed by emailing the Minister of Canadian Immigration :

[email redacted].ca

For more information:

Link to Emilie’s blog   

Link to CBC article