Houlton adoption director wins congressional Angel in Adoption Award

HOULTON – Jennifer F. Sylvester likes to recall the meaningful moments of her 23 years with MAPS, an adoption agency that specializes in local, national and international adoptions.

There was the time in 1998 that she escorted toddler twins off a plane at Bangor International Airport to the waiting arms of their soon-to-be adoptive parents. The children were the youngest of 29 saved from sure death at the hands of vicious rebels in civil war-torn Sierra Leone in West Africa.

Sylvester, 64, received the congressional Angel in Adoption Award on Sept. 30 for her adoption work and for helping to tear down the barriers that can prevent foster children and orphans from finding adoptive homes. She is the regional director for the MAPS Houlton office, a position from which she will retire at the end of this month.

Sylvester was nominated for the award by U.S. Sen. Susan Collins and took part in a Washington, D.C., ceremony Sept. 30 that featured a dinner for 1,000, including celebrities such as Muhammad Ali and his wife, Lonnie Ali, who have adopted, and actor Bruce Willis, an advocate who has spoken of the need to place more U.S. foster children in permanent homes.

Sylvester expressed surprise that she was picked for the national award. It was no surprise to her boss and mentor, Dawn Dagenhardt, who called Sylvester a “tireless worker” for children.

Sylvester said the honors and awards have meaning, but they are not the motivation for the job.

“You do these things because the need is there and the passion is there,” said Sylvester, who attended the national event with her husband, Torrey Sylvester, and their adopted daughter, Linda Sylvester, now 32, whom they brought into their family when she was 6. The couple has three biological children in their mid- to late 30s.

Sylvester was one of 150 people in the nation to receive the award this year. Started in 1999, the award is sponsored by the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute and brings attention to the millions of children worldwide in need of adoptive homes.

An estimated 550,000 children are in foster care in the United States, with 120,000 in immediate need of adoption. Worldwide an estimated 30 million orphans are waiting for new homes.

Sylvester “has worked tirelessly along with her staff in bringing children and families together for over [two decades] as a volunteer, an adoptive mother, and as a [regional] director of MAPS in Houlton with programs for adoption and humanitarian aid throughout the world,” states a press release.

Sylvester and Dagenhardt started a program in Vietnam in the early 1990s to link children needing homes with American families willing to raise them. The Vietnam-MAPS program has placed 400 children.

Yet it is the drama of Sierra Leone that stays close to Sylvester’s heart and mind. The treachery was so mind-numbing, the 25-hour trek to safety so harrowing, that the adults and young orphans they guided during the trip to the Ghana border are constantly on Sylvester’s mind.

Sylvester was in Houlton, thousands of miles away. She stayed near a telephone day and night.

“We would get messages [from Henry Abu, orphanage director],” Sylvester said. “First he would say ‘there’s a group of children coming toward the border.’ Then he would say it wasn’t our group. This went on three or four times. Then – finally – he confirmed that our people had made it. There were a lot of tears, you know?”

Sylvester immediately flew to Ghana to start the complicated procedure of getting the children to the United States. The work was done through the U.S. Embassy for Africans in Ghana. They came to the United States in two groups, one arriving several months ahead of the other.

The last group of 17 Sierra Leone orphans arrived in the United States in September 1998.