Alicia Swaringen and her son, Sthainder

EUGENE, Ore. – On Monday Alicia Swaringen got word she needed to head to Miami immediately.

Thursday afternoon she and her adopted son from Haiti were back in Eugene.

“What a whirlwind – I got the news on Monday to get a flight to Miami ASAP and yesterday in Miami, the process went through and I was able to get Sthainder!!” Swaringen wrote in an email to KVAL News. “I am in bliss.  We are doing well and I wanted you to know!!”

Since the Haiti Earthquake hit, Swaringen had been anxiously waiting word of when her son could come from an orphanage in Haiti to the United States.

She knew the four-year-old boy was not injured in the quake. He was at Eugene-based Holt International’s Fantana Village orphanage, 30 miles outside Port-au-Prince.

Still, she had no idea when she would be able to see her son. That is until she received word Monday to head to Miami and bring him back to Oregon.

 She first met Sthainder in May, when she visited Haiti. But the adoption process has been a long one –two years trying to adopt him, plus the seven months it took to initialize the adoption process.

After the earthquake, experts at Holt thought pending adoptions might be drawn out for another year or two in the aftermath.

But for Swaringen, that didn’t turn out to be the case, and now her son is far from the destruction in his home country.

“YAYAYAYAYAYAY,” she wrote, expressing her joy as best she could through e-mail. “He has immigrant status instead of citizenship status due to the humanitarian parole visa the State Department is giving the qualified orphans. I am not sure of the process but what a happy ending!”