Someone else did, though. In December of that year, Dr. Elaine Morgan, a Jewish pediatric oncologist at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago, flew to Haiti to meet the little girl with the intention of adopting her. When she returned home to Skokie, she began the labyrinthine paperwork that would allow her to become a mom to Djoude (pronounced Jude).

Morgan wasn't new to the process: She has five other children. The three oldest, boys 19, 23 and 26, are her biological children. (She is a single mother by choice.) The next two, girls 7 and 14, are African American children that she adopted in the States at birth. Except for one of the boys who is away at college, all of the children live with Morgan in Skokie.

"I always wanted kids," she says. "My job is all about kids. I had my first three and then I thought, you've brought three kids into this world, you're alone, and I wanted to do something for a kid who was already here." Once she adopted an African American child, "I thought, I'm not going to raise a black child in an all-white family," so she adopted another.

More recently, she says, "I was grabbed by the concept of giving an HIV-positive kid a home. I'm a pediatric oncologist. I don't ever mind having kids around."

"Now I think I'm done," she says.

When she decided she wanted to adopt a sixth child several years ago, some international adoption agencies turned down her request because of her age (63 now, 60 at the time) and the number of children she already had. Then she heard about a program that placed HIV-positive children from various countries in U.S. homes.

Morgan was interested, but specified that she didn't want a newborn - "I've had it with these all-nighters," she says - nor a much older child. And because her two youngest are girls and "my bedroom setup wouldn't work for a boy without a lot of changes," she specified a girl. In adopting from Haiti, she discovered, her age would not be a problem.

In March 2008, the director of an orphanage in Haiti e-mailed Morgan that she had an HIV-positive girl available. "There were a lot of issues. She was extremely tiny, malnourished, delayed. I was concerned about her potential. I didn't want a severely delayed, retarded child. It was unclear whether she was actually retarded or delayed by circumstances and her health," Morgan says.

When she and her 14-year-old daughter went to visit Djoude, they found that the latter was the case, and Morgan began filling out paperwork that would allow her to adopt the little girl and bring her to the United States. That was close to two years ago.

"Haiti is very disorganized," Morgan says. "Even when they're organized, they're disorganized." Several sets of paperwork and medical tests were lost, and just when Morgan was set to receive a special dispensation from the president of Haiti, he stopped issuing them.

Finally, a visa was issued for Djoude on Jan. 5 of this year. Morgan, with a busy oncology practice and younger children whose care needed to be arranged, planned to go to Haiti on Jan 17 and return two days later with Djoude.

On Jan. 12, "I was standing on the El platform coming home and one of my colleagues paged me. There had been a major earthquake in Haiti. I saw what was going on and I just about gave up," Morgan says. "I couldn't travel. I didn't even know if Djoude was still alive."

Two frantic days later, Morgan found out that her daughter had indeed survived and was being cared for at an orphanage in the mountains outside of Port-au-Prince, the hard-hit capital city. Then problems began anew.

"Her visa issued on the 5th was in a building in Port-au-Prince," Morgan reports. "The building wasn't completely demolished," but no one could get in to get the visa, and without it, Djoude could not leave the country.

In addition, the roads leading away from the orphanage were virtually impassable, and there was little gas for cars. "The orphanage was running out of fuel for the generator and to purify their water. It was a very unpretty picture. They were living hand to mouth. It was just a mess," Morgan says.

Eventually, "with a lot of people working, a lot of starts and stops, plans getting cancelled, new plans being made, they finally took all the kids down from the mountain and coptered them to the airport at Port-au-Prince to a waiting plane, which they almost missed," Morgan says. The flight, which held a number of other Haitian children being adopted by U.S. families, was due to land in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., so Morgan joined other families from around the country to wait for the new arrivals.

Finally, on Friday, Jan. 22, Morgan held Djoude in her arms. They flew home to Chicago the same day.

The child was in surprisingly good shape, Morgan reports with delight. "The kids in this orphanage were the most well-fed, the best looking of the kids coming out of Haiti," she says. "She was clean, and her hair was all in braids. Her clothes weren't exactly for fashion plates, but she was fine. She had some medical issues but she would have had them regardless."

It was Djoude's personality, though, that really surprised her, Morgan says. "She is not passive and easy-going," she says. "I thought she would be so traumatized she would be cowering in a corner. Boy, was I wrong."

Djoude began expressing likes and dislikes almost as soon as she arrived, her new mom says. "She knows who I am, she identifies me as mama, she gives me hugs, she has a sense of belonging. The first few days she was a bundle of fun, but she has a little temper. She is very possessive of me. When my 7-year-old is around me, touching me, she goes a little crazy. And she doesn't like to be touched by people she doesn't know," Morgan says.

Those issues, like many others, will be worked out over time, Morgan says. Djoude spoke only Creole when she arrived - Morgan doesn't speak Creole - but the family "is talking to her entirely in English, much as you would do with a one-year-old," and is confident she will soon learn the language. Also new to Djoude were cold weather - "she is not really a fan of it," Morgan says - car seats and American food. Now "she eats everything in sight."

By the day after her arrival, "you just thought she had been in the house forever," Morgan says. "She's gone with me to the grocery store, to my daughter's gymnastics meets. When I take my 7-year-old to temple, I take her into the building."

Morgan is a member of Temple Beth Israel in Skokie and is raising her children as Jews. Acceptance of her unusual family "has really never been a problem for me there," she says. "If it had been a problem, I would have found a different venue. It's just that there are not a lot of children of color. It's not that they're excluded. My children are just sort of different."

She notes that with her older children that was also the case in Skokie public schools, but now there are far more African Americans and Hispanics. "I never had a problem with my kids being accepted," she says.

More troubling are Djoude's medical problems. Her HIV is not well controlled and she has perforated eardrums on both sides from unknown causes. In addition, Morgan says, although she looks about two, she is supposed to have been born in 2005, which would make her almost five. In some areas, her skills surpass those of American children, in others she lags behind.

"She is very delayed (because of her upbringing and medical issues) but she is a bright kid and will eventually go into a regular classroom," Morgan says. For now, Djoude attends a special day care for HIV-positive children and the children of HIV-positive parents.

Even though Djoude is safe now, Morgan says her thoughts return again and again to her adopted daughter's homeland. "The people in Haiti have nothing," she says. "That there should be such poverty in our hemisphere ... What happened in Haiti was not a natural disaster. The same (size) earthquake in San Francisco resulted in 70 deaths.

"Haiti did not get the attention it should have gotten," she says. "Hopefully this will turn it around."