Free Where We Belong by Hoda Kotb Page A

Rick was known as a community leader, a quality guy, and a very skilled businessman. He was also a successful fund-raiser for his alma mater, the University of Tennessee. In fall 2005, Craig received an e-mail from Rick asking if he’d like to be included in a threesome for Saturday golf. ASU had a bye week, so Craig agreed; it would be nice to pick Rick’s brain about improving fund-raising efforts at ASU. That morning, the men decided to tee off on the back nine and soon began exchanging details about their personal lives. Craig beamed about Kathi. Then it was Rick’s turn.
    “I was intrigued by the way Rick spoke,” Craig recalls. “He spoke from the heart.”
    Rick and his wife had raised three boys and took great pride in their kids’ accomplishments and character. As Rick grabbed a six iron, he added that several years earlier, he and his wife had adopted two little girls from Haiti. Ting! He launched the ball into the middle of the green.
    From that swing forward, the golf game for Craig took a backseat to his curiosity about Rick’s “second” family. He’d never talked to someone about adopting, let alone from another country. He wasn’t even sure where Haiti was on the world map. He asked Rick, “Do they call you Dad?”
    Rick said yes.
    “When he talked about his daughters he would tear up,” Craig says. “This was not just something that he agreed to with his wife and he was a passenger on the ride. It was important to him. It mattered.”
    Craig next asked Rick why they adopted from Haiti. The answer was sobering. Rick explained that Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, where hundreds of thousands of orphaned children are starving and living in squalor. He added, “We probably should have adopted more.”
    Craig was transfixed and had countless questions for Rick. He learned that the Federicos used an agency that specialized in international adoptions, and they fell in love with a photo of the two sisters on a Web page. They flew to Haiti several weeks later to meet the girls and advance the adoption process. When Craig asked Rick if parenting adopted kids felt any different from raising his boys, Rick said, “Parenting is parenting. I loved it the first time, and the fact of the matter is I am doing a better job of parenting now than I did with the boys. Most of that is because I have more experience this time around.”
    The conversation stirred a sense of purpose in Craig that had been waiting, yearning for direction.
    “The more he talked with me about Haiti, the more interested I was,” Craig says. “That’s when the train left the station: that day at golf.”
    On the drive home, Craig called Kathi and asked her to make dinner reservations; he had something to discuss with her that night. All afternoon, he researched as much as he could about Haiti and an American priest Rick mentioned who had started a nonprofit organization in Haiti in one of the poorest and most dangerous slums in the world. At dinner that night, before their meals even arrived, Craig launched a verbal bomb downfield.
    “I’m thinking about taking a trip to Haiti.”
    Across the table, Kathi responded as if he’d called the wrong play.
    “I started laughing at him. It was kind of like that first-date lunch,” she says, laughing again as she remembers the night. “ Really? I said to him, ‘Last time I checked, I don’t think there’s a Ritz-Carlton in Haiti.’ That was so far out of Craig’s element.”
    But she took a deep breath and let him explain his sudden interest in the western end of Hispaniola.
    “I’ve learned over the years,” Kathi explains, “to soft-sell my opinions a little more and to be more flexible. I won’t dig my heels in; I’ll try to ask some questions.”
    How would he travel there? Would he need inoculations? Were there safety concerns?
    Craig didn’t have details; he talked instead of the country’s chaos and the desperate children in need of families,