Her first mother abandoned her; her second mother rescued her, getting her out of Albania during rioting and gunfire.
On Monday, 2-year-old Ermira, known as Mira, was safe in New Berlin, Wis., thanks to a mother she has known only a short time.Talking about the chaos they had come through, Joann Perleberg said, "I just couldn't let her be abandoned twice."
Earlier this month, Perleberg, a 33-year-old social studies teacher at Dominican High School in Whitefish Bay, Wis., traveled to Albania to adopt Mira. Perleberg was accompanied by her mother, Josephine, and her brother, Mark, 43, of Batavia, Ill.
"I wanted to give a family to a child that didn't have one," Perle-berg said.
Mira certainly qualified. Abandoned by her mother, Mira lived in an orphanage. On March 4, Perleberg met Mira, hugged her, fed her, coddled her, played with her, loved her and wouldn't give her up when she could have run and saved herself last week.
In New Berlin, Mira, unaffected by the chaos she'd come through, leaned over and kissed the family dog, Rhett Butler, who kissed her back, sort of.
Holding up her arms to her new mother, Mira said, "Up."
"Her first American word," Perleberg said.
Last year, Bethany Christian Services, of Waukesha, Wis., helped Perleberg locate an adoptable Albanian child - Mira - and assisted Perleberg in court in Albania recently, when she adopted Mira. However, under Albanian law, the adoption wasn't final for nearly three weeks, so Perleberg, her mother and brother settled in for the wait. Then rioting broke out and Americans scrambled to get out of the country.
Last week, the American Embassy warned Americans to leave Albania when rioting broke out.
"I was very scared," Perleberg said.
Her mother and brother decided to try to get by van to Durres, a seaport where they could catch a ferry to Italy.
"It was very hard to see my family go, but Mira is my family now, too," Perleberg said.
Shortly after her mother and brother left, an official at the American Embassy called Perleberg to the embassy and told her to "Go get the kids."
The official referred to Mira and a 3-year-old boy who'd just been adopted by Dawn Jannsen, of De Smet, S.D., who also was at the apartment house. As Perleberg returned to the apartment, she heard snipers again.
The embassy official said a van would meet them in a few minutes outside a nearby restaurant. The two women, lugging kids and diapers and Cheerios and baggage, hurried to the restaurant.
"We hid down in the van and we were very scared," Perleberg said. "We were taking kids out illegally."
The driver took them "to a safe house at the American compound," she said. "There was sniper fire going on around the houses, and everybody had to stay away from the windows. We sat in a hallway and the teacher in me came out."
U.S. military helicopters roared into the compound, some of them under gunfire. Perle-berg, who cradled Mira in her arms in the helicopter, wind rushing over them, was airlifted to the USS Nashville, an amphibious transport dock 16 miles out in the Adriatic Sea.
Later, in Rome, Perleberg met up with her mother and brother. They had gotten into the middle of a riot at the seaport, where the ferry had been shut down.
Albanians threatened them, gunfire went on all night as they huddled outside on the beach, and crowds "tore buildings apart, building fires," Josephine Perleberg said. "We were scared, and final words were said."
But next day, on her 68th birthday, a group of "Italian marines came ashore, formed a line, shoulder to shoulder, and we all got into landing barges," she said.