Foundation For Large Families
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And Then There Were None
SHELLEY PAGE
Ottawa Citizen
Thursday, July 10, 2003
Published by the Canada Tibet Committee
Their nest is empty - after 21 children - but former Pointe Claire residents Fred and Bonnie Cappuccino, parents of what may be Canada's largest adoptive family, are still reaching out.
Bonnie Cappuccino got off an airplane from India about two decades ago with a gold stud through her nostril and announced to Fred, her husband, who was at the airport to meet her: "Henceforth, we are vegetarian." So they were.
On a later trip, she arrived home anchored by dozens of pendants around her neck, thick brass bracelets clanging like gongs on her thin arms, a ring on each finger. She wore a sari. As the fiftysomething white woman floated through the airport, people gawked.
"Fred, straighten your tie," she said. "Can't you see all the people looking at you?"
Fred knew darn well they were staring at his wife, who had left Canada a few weeks earlier in Western garb. Bonnie always forged her own path. How else to explain how the couple ended up adopting 19 children, to add to their two biological children, when Fred maintains he had agreed to adopt only two?
"She just kept putting paperwork in front of me to sign," he said with a laugh, sitting in the couple's century-old farmhouse outside Maxville, east of Ottawa. The home that once housed 16 of their 21 children is now empty, except for Fred, who talks about his wife with a mix of amusement and worry.
He hasn't seen her for more than five weeks and isn't certain where she is. To be sure, if she were here, she would dispute her husband's explanation of how they became perhaps the largest adoptive family in Canada.
Four times a year, Bonnie visits seven homes for destitute children in India, Nepal, Tibet and Bangladesh that are run by Child Haven, the charity she and Fred established in 1985. They care for 706 destitute children.
But this journey has been more perilous than the others.
To reach Tibet, Bonnie, 68, usually flies to Lhasa, the exotic capital of Tibet, from Kathmandu in Nepal. But this winter, flights were suspended. The only way in was overland by Land Rover along a treacherous pass through the Himalayas, which at certain points climbs to 5,360 metres, making it the highest land pass in the world. Bonnie was going in February, a time of heavy snowfall and unpredictable weather.
Included in her entourage were two sons, Robin and Mohan. Robin, 48, "the couple's firstborn and third eldest," thought the three-day journey to the highest place in the world might be "too onerous" for his mother, and was glad to accompany her. At the same time, he knew she was probably more hardy than he. "When I was a child, she used to say she didn't have time to be sick. She was always moving."
Four days later, Fred was relieved to get a phone call from Bonnie telling him that they had made it safely to Tibet.
The next phone call was more worrisome. It was from a tiny inn 30 kilometres from the Nepalese border.
The entourage had left to return to Kathmandu, but after three days of travel, ran headlong into a winter snowstorm. Bonnie told Fred not to worry, they would find a way out. She didn't tell him the Land Rovers had returned to Lhasa to wait for spring.
The Cappuccino home without the legendary Cappuccino kids is a cluttered, echoing farmhouse. Fred and Bonnie's 21 children, who range in age from 29 to 54 years old, are spread across North America. With Bonnie away, the home seems even emptier. Fred shuffles from living room to kitchen to the Child Haven office at the back of the house, where two employees are glued to computers. He contemplates sermons he might give at fundraisers. He makes phone calls. He pushes heaps of books around the coffee tables - tomes about Mahatma Gandhi and JFK, and living a moral life.
He looks around the empty home. It's impossible to imagine where all the children once slept. Sometimes, there were three or four to a bedroom. "One girl" - Fred pauses to remember which daughter - fashioned a bedroom out of curtains at the top of the stairs. The house was filled mostly with laughter and chaos.
"We decided if we were going to have a family this large, we had to give up some things. Worldly possessions, material goods. Housework is not important to us."
As extraordinary as their family is, however, made up of children from Bangladesh, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Canada and the United States, it is perhaps the couple's 50-year relationship that is most remarkable.
Fred, then 27, was in his last year of theology school in Evanston, Ill., when he met Bonnie McClung, a 19-year-old student nurse from rural Illinois. Fred, who likes to say he is the son of a Welsh Protestant mother and an Italian-American atheist father who was an ornamental plasterer, was immediately smitten with Bonnie. After a six-month courtship, they were married in 1953.
When Fred graduated, he asked the Methodist bishop for a "tough charge." He was sent to a working-class congregation in Chicago that had ejected its last three ministers. Fred was popular and soon had to run two services on Sundays to handle the increase in churchgoers. When Bonnie and Fred were first married, they both agreed they did not want to bring a lot of children into the world because they thought it overpopulated. They planned to have two biological children and then adopt two.
Their first son was born in 1954. They named him Robin Hood, after the folk hero who robbed from the rich to give to the poor.
But their attempts to adopt children in the United States failed. Agencies said the children should go to couples who couldn't have biological children. Fred thought they should look to Japan, where he had worked for three years in orphanages. There, he had heard about an orphanage for children whose mothers were Japanese and fathers were black U.S. soldiers. Fred knew these mixed-race children would have difficulty being accepted in Japanese society. He hadn't really considered whether they would face similar difficulties in the racially charged Chicago of the 1950s. Soon, a 5-year-old girl, Machiko, was selected to join the family as Robin's big sister.
They adopted 7-year-old William Tell, also of mixed-race from Japan, another older sibling for Robin. Their second biological son was born: Pierre Ceresole, named after a Swiss pacifist. Then they adopted their second daughter, Annie Laurie, who was a shy Korean toddler who required foot surgery. Next they adopted two baby boys, both born in the United States; Michael had been born to mixed-race parents, while Mohan's birth parents were Sri Lankan.
In 1967, Fred and Bonnie thought they would give Canada a try, and took over a Unitarian congregation in Pointe Claire, where their growing family lived for seven years. While there, Fred and Bonnie adopted four more children: Lakshmi and Tran, from Vietnam, Shikha from Bangladesh, and Kahlil, who was born in Canada.
"It got to be so easy. People would call us to see if we would take children," Fred said. "There always seemed to be room. We just couldn't say no." By 1985, when the Cappuccinos formed Child Haven, they were parents of 21 kids.
People have asked Fred and Bonnie whether it was possible to be good parents to that many children.
"We did our best. Bonnie was always at home. I had a lot of flex time, so I was there a lot. And all the kids helped each other." There was always someone to talk to.
He remembers one of his daughters arriving when she was 6 years old. "She was standing in a hay wagon. She shouted out to me, 'Daddy, I'm going to work really hard so I can stay here.' " As Fred tells the story, tears pool in his eyes.
Each year, a few of the Cappuccino children accompany their mother on one of her journeys while Fred holds the fort at home.
This most recent trip through the Himalayas has been the hardest to wait through. "I thought she would come out of it OK, I just wasn't sure how."
Fred was relieved to get a phone call. He hadn't known his wife and sons ended up having to walk out. While they found porters to carry Bonnie on their backs to the Nepal border, the hike was treacherous - along narrow mountain paths and through deep snow. In retrospect, he was glad he did not know. When they told him what had happened, he laughed far too hard.
"I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. So I laughed," he said.
A week later, the Cappuccino farm is louder - there is a bustle that has been restored. Bonnie has returned and is standing in the kitchen, wearing an airy pink sari, discussing coming fundraising dinners with a volunteer.
She moves slowly, still jet-lagged, around the kitchen. She is a slight, thin woman who doesn't seem to weigh more than her jangling bangles and medallions.
She is very matter-of-fact about her journey. At most, she will say she was "apprehensive," while Robin, in an interview later, admits to having been extremely worried.
All the while Bonnie talks, Fred looks at his wife with complete amusement. There is a look on his bearded face that seems to say: "Isn't she just the most amazing person you've ever met?"
Bonnie doesn't think she's much different from anyone else. "Except maybe I don't have a condo in Florida to retire to," she joked. "This has just become our way of life. We like to help people. I can't imagine living any other way."
Retirement is a big question. Fred is 77, Bonnie 68. Fred has given up the punishing travel, while Bonnie continues, but the charities' supporters realize they can't keep it up forever.
Fred has said he is looking forward to a big celebration for their 50th anniversary.
He hopes to gather all of their children to celebrate the life they have lived.
On the Web: Child Haven
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