Sometimes, a simple plea can move hard hearts and bend rigid rules. Sometimes, common sense and common decency win the day. That’s why everyone was smiling as we sat around a round table at Macayo’s, ordering heaping plates of Mexican food. Sitting with me were Gabrielle, Kiersten, and their dad and mom – Yancy and Debbie Evans.

The fact that there’s an Evans family at all is a story of love and courage, and that they’re living in the Valley and eating at a favorite Phoenix restaurant is a story of simple pleas and common decency. So, when Debbie e-mailed and said it was time to meet the family I’d helped save some six years ago, I jumped at the opportunity.

My first commentary came when nobody was smiling and it seemed unlikely that the Evans family would ever be living together in Arizona. “Please help this family,” I told television viewers on May 26, 1999, when I was doing a commentary called “Hot Talk” every morning on Channel 3.

It started like this: “Senator Jon Kyl, Senator John McCain, Governor Jane Dee Hull… please listen up and help this family that’s being held hostage in Panama by the United States government, which refuses to allow Debbie Evans and her two adopted daughters into the United States.”

What made the situation even worse was that Yancy and Debbie had gone to Panama to serve in the United States Army, leaving their former posts at Fort Huachuca.

Yancy was born at St. Joe’s and grew up in Phoenix, while Debbie had moved here with her family when she was 7. The two met while working at a Basha’s – Debbie at first tried to fix Yancy up with her sister, but soon realized her mistake. They were married in January 1990, went into the service that September, and in late 1991, found themselves stationed in Panama.

All this time, they were trying to establish a family, and even though they got pregnant eight times, they were never able to bring a baby into the world. As they looked around, Debbie saw that she and her husband were living in a place that cherishes “the family.” “Panama has real respect for the family unit,” she says. “Children are considered one of the country’s treasures. Even if we’d had our own kids, we would have adopted.”

They wanted babies and hired a lawyer to help. And they didn’t wait long. They were at the hospital within 15 minutes of Gabrielle’s birth on November 25, 1993. She’s the daughter of a Panamanian father and a single mother who was a Nicaraguan freedom fighter.

Debbie remembers how everyone always clucked over her beautiful little girl. One day when Gabrielle was about 10 months old, they were at an ice-cream shop when a woman asked if she wanted a sister for her daughter. Debbie said she did, and three weeks later, after engaging a new attorney, she got word that Kiersten was born. They got her three days later. Kiersten is the daughter of an Indian mother who lived on a nearby island and supported herself as a housekeeper.
Nothing is known of her birth father.

About that time, Yancy’s discharge was approaching, and he couldn’t extend his duty in Panama. The new parents were getting nervous because they couldn’t get their hands on the final paperwork for the adoptions.

With just a month before Yancy had to go home, he and Debbie were devastated to learn that the so-called lawyers they’d hired hadn’t done anything – Gabrielle’s adoption had never been registered, and there was absolutely nothing on Kiersten. “We could have been arrested for stealing a kid,” Yancy recalls.

But they had pictures from when the girls were just days old, and neighbors ready to testify. Debbie remembers the “little tiny judge” who first heard their plight in a Panama court. “I will not take these babies from you,” the judge promised.

“The Panamanian government was ready to let us go, but the U.S. government wouldn’t,” Debbie says. “The U.S. Consulate kept changing the story on what we needed to do to take the girls home. I’d do what they said, and there’d be new requirements. Nothing was good enough. Their whole attitude was, ‘Things aren’t on the up and up.'”

As they mounted their arguments, Debbie discovered websites that showed there were military families all over the world that were “stuck because they were waiting out adoptions.”

Regardless, Yancy couldn’t wait forever, so he flew to Phoenix in January of 1998. It would be 18 months before Debbie and the girls would join him.

“I was told, ‘You need to put the children in an orphanage, Mrs. Evans, and you need to go back and establish a home.’ But I wouldn’t leave them – Panama would think I was abandoning them.”

And that’s where I came in. Debbie’s father, Robert Fetters, was then pastor of Shepherds Church in Phoenix, and the church was raising money and organizing prayer vigils for the family. That inspired news stories. And then I got e-mails from Debbie in Panama, filling me in on how stubborn the American officials were being. When she wrote me, it looked like our government would never bend.

“Evans’ message yesterday was particularly disturbing,” I said in that first commentary. “Immigration officials had told her there was no way to fix this unless she left her kids and re-established her home in Phoenix. She was told that even her senator couldn’t help her. I wonder how Kyl and McCain, who wants to be president, will respond to that snub. Governor Hull… you can imagine how impotent that INS bureaucrat thinks you are. Won’t somebody please help this woman? Her family in Phoenix and their church are doing all they can, but things are looking grim. Debbie, don’t give up hope.”

Two days later I yelled at President Bill Clinton, noting that it was absurd that officials were being so mean. But I did have some good news: “Senator John McCain, a Republican, is now working on this, there are people all over the country flooding the INS with letters and calls. Apparently, our cage-rattling on ‘Hot Talk’ has helped. I received an email from Evans yesterday saying that the INS official in Panama called her, all nice and everything, telling her he’d love to see what I’d said on television. Then he told her, and let me quote from her e-mail, ‘The Immigration and Naturalization Service has decided to work with the U.S. Consulate regarding your situation with the girls.’ Wow! Before, they said that there was nothing else they could do. But don’t let up. Write and call the INS and the politicians, because we’ve got to get Evans and her babies home.”

Debbie remembers that e-mails were arriving from everywhere. “Hillary Clinton’s office e-mailed us [she was First Lady then], Matt Salmon [then an Arizona Congressman] and Strom Thurmond [then one of the nation’s most influential senators]. John McCain was helping – he was born in Panama, he’s a Zonie. And Channel 3 freaked them out. It became very clear that the INS didn’t want all of this attention.”

Meanwhile, the family was sinking financially. It’s expensive to fly from Phoenix to Panama – a trip that Yancy made regularly to see his family and be on hand for court dates. Debbie sold her cherished Stephen King collection of novels to raise money to keep the family going. She also was holding her breath, because, at the time, she was in Panama with an expired visa that could lead to her deportation at any time. She and the girls moved often, staying with friends here and there. “I could move everything I owned in a taxi,” she recalls. “But we were blessed by the kindness of strangers.”

The first break came when the U.S. government announced that they were OK with Gabrielle going to Phoenix, but Kiersten would have to be left behind. As I told viewers in a commentary on June 9, 1999: “Evans has a simple response, ‘No way.'”

“I said nobody’s going until everybody goes,” Debbie recalls, and some of that resolve still rings in her voice. “I decided if I had to stay there for the rest of my life, I’d do it.”

Yancy remembers he was becoming convinced he’d have to move to Panama, too, and find a job in order to raise his daughters.

And then it all broke loose. “The media and the prayers are what made the difference,” Debbie says. But she also admits, “I was just real tenacious. In my world, there’s always a way. They kept telling me no – there’s no such thing as no.”

The other thing that made the difference was the closeness of this couple. “We have a philosophy that we’re a team, and there’s no ‘I’ in team,” Yancy says.

Yancy was front and center at Sky Harbor International Airport when the plane from Panama finally arrived in August of 1999.

Gabrielle, 6, and 5-year-old Kiersten got to meet their cousins and grandparents. Kiersten remembers she got off the plane wearing her purple Pooh Bear backpack; her sister had a green Pocahontas backpack. Yancy had grown a beard since he’d last seen his children. Gabrielle kept touching her father’s face.

“We were both numb,” Yancy remembers. “You dream about it so long,” Debbie adds. “We were like short-circuiting.”

Abrielle is now in fifth grade and Kiersten is in fourth at Griffith Elementary School in Phoenix. Gabrielle, who’s on the honor roll, is a quiet, respectful student. She’s reading at a seventh-grade level and raising a dog named Maggie. Kiersten is the animated one with the terrific sense of humor. She likes watching TV and knows how to Tivo. She’s raising a “scardy cat” Shiatsu named Spenser, who’s “more like a chicken than a dog.” Both girls are nuts about Disneyland, where the family likes to vacation.

Debbie is an admissions coordinator for a healthcare program, while Yancy works as a media specialist at a church.

Friday nights are “family night” – they go to movies sometimes, eat out, go shopping, spend time connected as a family. Debbie and the girls like doing walkathons for worthy causes. And, of course, grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins are constants in their lives.

Ask them what they’ve learned from their ordeal – it seems so far away for the girls now, but still so raw for the parents – and here’s what they say:

Kiersten: “I learned that people care about us and really want us to be like a family.”

Gabrielle likes to share her good fortune by helping others: “It starts from little things and gets to big things and helps people.”

Yancy: “I learned to despise government bureaucracy even more than I already did.”

Debbie: “There’s kindness in strangers and always a way if you push – there’s no such thing as no.”

Yancy and Debbie admit now that if they’d known how long the road would be and how hard they’d have to fight, they probably would have “freaked” from the start. But they didn’t know. All they knew is that they loved these little girls, and would do anything in the world to live together as a family.