Adlise doesn't remember Haiti, the pain of the burns or the recovery. She barely remembers the five major operations at Shriners Hospital in Boston, where Coburn brought her to reassemble her hands, face and chest.
Now, however, the Pasco High School junior wants to remember. She's preparing to make her first trip back to Haiti since she left about 15 years ago. On March 17, she and Coburn will begin a 14-day journey to Haiti's mountain villages.
It will be a quest to find a birth mother Adlise knows only by name, Allise Pierre, and through fading color pictures saved by Coburn. No one in her adopted family has spoken with "Mama Pierre" for 15 years. Adlise knows she had a younger sister, but she doesn't know if any members of her Haitian family have survived the hard mountain life.
When they reach Haiti, they will take a day's journey by bus along dirt roads from Port-au-Prince to a tiny western village. From there, they will rely on hope and faith.
Adlise's questions for her birth mother still come in stuttering hiccups.
Who pulled her from that fire pit?
How is it that no one was looking when she fell in?
Why did her parents have to give her away?
She understands some questions may be too big for answers.
Haiti is a Maryland-sized country populated by 9 million to 10 million people -- mountainous, volcanic and in the heart of the Caribbean.
Haiti occupies the western third of the island it shares with the Dominican Republic, and it remains the single poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
When political unrest doesn't upset the country's progress, nature typically does the job.
Hurricanes annually destroy the modest dwellings. Disease and malnutrition are common and injuries often remain untreated.
"Adlise was from an area where there's been 50,000 people without medical care," said Miriam Fredricks, the Florida director of World Harvest Mission who has led medical missionary expeditions into Haiti's mountains for 32 years. "Children who've been burned would stay burned and scarred."
Fredricks and Coburn made repeated trips to Haiti together, beginning in 1987. Fredricks, an experienced nurse, dispensed medicine and care during open-air clinics in mountain villages. Coburn and other missionaries helped by prioritizing who most needed medical care and dispensing clothes and food.
"I knew the minute I stepped foot on that island my life was going to change," Coburn said. "I didn't know how but I knew it would change."
It was hard to not be touched by the devastation, she said. Dysentery and intestinal disease are among Haiti's biggest problems, killing many children under 5.
For children like Adlise, a severely infected hand may just as easily be lopped off. A child who can't grow to take care of herself may be left to die, beg or, at best, to be raised in an orphanage.
"You see crippled people crawling on the ground. Tumors grow until usually the child dies," Fredricks said. "If you're blind, if you're deaf, you're just left at the mercy of the people."
To say Adlise was lucky to come to the United States would be to ignore that she came as a severely burned black child who lived in predominantly white communities on the East Coast. Even after successful surgeries repaired much of her scarring, she went on to endure, and fight, years of name calling, ridicule and staring.
Under the circumstances, though, Adlise agrees she was fortunate.
In the United States, she grew up in a large, caring family.
The Coburns raised two of their own children -- Jeff, 30, and Lottie, 25 -- then adopted five more. Tony, 18, and Terrell, 14, were adopted while the family was in Boston. Leanne, 13, and Cheree, 9, were adopted from Haiti, both needy and incapable of tending for themselves.
Chris Coburn's husband, David, is a quiet man with a salt-and-pepper beard who retired from his job as an electrician more than five years ago. He has never stepped foot in Haiti but received with open arms each of the children his wife brought back.
"They all just seemed to show up on the doorstep," he said in a low, slowly paced voice.
Adlise became a U.S. citizen in 2001 and has American dreams now. As she twirls dog tags that hang around her neck, a recent gift from the Army after she wrote about her interest in joining the service, she talks about joining the Air Force or the Marines.
But before she can move forward, she wants to look back and find out where she came from. "I hope to maybe gain some self-confidence."
She's about 18 months from graduation and has begun her senior project, choosing to study the entertainment and communication of Haiti.
She has been learning French to help her understand Creole, Haiti's common language, which is a mixture of French, African and English.
She is an avid runner and loves rap music.
But knowing who she is in the United States gives her little insight into what she will face in Haiti. Even among her own family, few understand.
"I don't really have an idea what it's like for her," said Tony, who is black and was adopted when the family lived in Boston. "But I'm real proud of her for going."
Adlise hasn't shied away from difficulties. She helps raise the younger children, including Cheree, who is autistic and has Down syndrome, Terrell, who has myotonic dystrophy, and Leanne, who is legally blind.
Yet she shrugs off questions about what she expects from her trip to Haiti.
Her mother is more blunt. "When the emotions come, that's something we will deal with together," she said.
Coburn, whose experience in Haiti spans three decades, said they will travel to the country with a medical clinic sponsored by World Harvest Missions.
Once they arrive in Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital, they will send radio messages out to the mountains announcing open-air clinics to be held in various villages.
Word of mouth carries the message quickly. By the time missionaries arrive at their destinations, hundreds typically await, carrying loved ones in homemade stretchers or lugging starving children.
If Adlise's mother is there, she is certain she will find them. And Coburn hopes she will be able to repay the precious gift she received nearly 15 years ago.
"We owe this to her parents," she said. "We owe it to tell them they made the right decision, that she has had a productive life."
Topic: SELFLESS GIVING
