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Keeping orphans off the street Mail Tribune / Bob Pennell Mikaela, left, and Matthew, 1-year-old twins, were adopted by Michelle Morain and her husband Peter Kjenaas, with the help of nuns in Bolivia. The Ashland family is now trying to raise money for the orphanage that saves street children in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Ashland couple try to raise money for Bolivian �throwaway� kids By Bill Varble On the mean streets of Cochabamba, Bolivia, live an unknown number of throwaway children. In Ashland live Matthew and Mikaela, twin babies adopted in Cochabamba by an Ashland couple with the help of some dedicated Bolivian nuns. To find out more Amanecer�s work in Cochabamba is supported by donations and some grants. Many staffers are members of religious orders and aren�t paid through the program. The organization operates with an administrative cost of about 10 percent of its budget. For more on Amanecer, go to www.amanecer-bolivia.org Contact Amanecer care of Sister Stephanie, St. Joseph�s Provincial House, 330 Seaton Ave., Emmitsburgh, MD 21727, or call (301) 447-3121. Contact Kjenaas and Morain at [email protected] For information on Children�s Home International, go to www.adopting.com/chi or e-mail [email protected] Peter Kjenaas and Michelle Morain went to Bolivia in March and April to adopt the twins, who were born in a remote mountain village and wound up in an orphanage. Now Kjenaas and Morain want to raise money to help the nuns in their continuing fight to help the street children of Cochabamba. "We were stunned by the devotion of these elderly women," Kjenaas says. "It�s beyond description. Sister Mary is the Mother Teresa of Bolivia. She and Sister Stephanie, who is 90, have spearheaded this effort." Both nuns are Americans but have lived for years in Bolivia, where they run an organization called Amanecer. Kjenaas, a writer, and Morain, an actress, worked as actors at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in the late 1980s and early 1990s (he was Tybalt in "Romeo and Juliet," she Elizabeth in "Richard III," among many roles). Kjenaas has one grown son. Friends suggested to Kjenaas and Morain that they share their story and appeal for help for the nuns. Amanecer (pronounced a-MAN-a-cer) means daybreak or dawn, the beginning of light. It was founded by the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul in 1981. Unemployed miners and country people for years have been moving to the city to look for work. Most wind up living in shantytowns at the edge of the city. Alcoholism and domestic abuse are rampant. Many children of these slums wind up being abandoned or running away to live in the streets, where they take to petty crime. Amanecer runs a school that takes in the kids and tries to bring them up to an educational level that enables them to go into the public schools. It provides medical and dental care with the help of Bolivian and foreign doctors. Twice a week, elderly nuns and other Amanecer staffers go out on the streets in the worst parts of the city with food and milk, looking for street kids. Their goal: Bring children into the program before they fall into drugs and prostitution. "There are so many," Morain says. "It�s mostly boys. They�re 8, 7, even 6. The nuns spread the word they�ll open the door to any boy." To stay in the program, the boys have to show an interest in being off the street and giving up some of the hard street ways. "Not stealing too much," Kjenaas says. There�s a separate facility for battered women and women with children. After checking out more than 20 adoption agencies, Kjenaas and Morain had settled on Washington-based Children�s House International, which arranged the adoption. When they traveled to Bolivia in late March they found themselves in the middle of a frightening civil disturbance. Angry that the government had privatized water and sold it to foreigners, workers organized a general strike. "It started Gandhi-like and turned violent," Kjenaas says. People felled trees and threw nails in the streets and set tires on fire. Kjenaas and Morain met doctors who had been treating the poor and were chased by a mob, only to be saved when somebody threw open a garage door. After five weeks in Bolivia, the couple brought home the twins. Matthew�s birth name was Fermin (which means "strong"). Mikaela�s was Sinforosa ("the muse"). Their first birthday was this month. Both are on the verge of taking their first steps. "They crawl like jets," Morain says. Kjenaas and Morain say their dream is for the twins to be able fulfill dreams of their own. "We want them to know they�re Bolivians," says Kjenaas. "But we want them to feel comfortable in both countries." 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