It is there, about 6,350 miles from home, that Meyer, 40, and Compton, 39, have spent most of the last 7 1/2 months as Noah learned to walk, ate his first banana - and became a pawn in a battle with Kazakh officials who have blocked what the couple expected to be a routine adoption.
Compton, a psychology professor at Haverford College, remains in Taraz, spending three hours a day with Noah at an orphanage while fighting the Kazakhstan bureaucracy. Her husband, a labor lawyer with a Center City firm, returned four weeks ago to an empty house on Haverford's campus and the possibility that Noah might never arrive at the freshly painted, toy-filled room that has been waiting for him for nearly a year.
"It was incredibly hard to leave," Meyer said. "I may never see him again. That's horrifying."
Since January, government officials in the region have abruptly rejected adoptions by seven foreign families - another is pending - leaving in limbo the families and the 10 orphans they seek to adopt. The families call them the "Taraz Ten."
Besides the growing resistance of many countries to giving up their children to foreign adoptions, the much-publicized death in January of tabloid celebrity Casey Johnson may have played a role, adoption advocates speculate. The fast-living heiress had adopted a daughter from the Taraz orphanage where Noah lives.
"Attitudes toward international adoptions are changing, absolutely," said Leonette Boiarski of the Pearl S. Buck Welcome House, the Perkasie adoption agency that arranged the boy's adoption. "Countries want to be able to take care of their children."
'Love at first sight'
Meyer and Compton were hopeful when they set out for sparsely populated Kazakhstan on Dec. 16.
