DURHAM - Lori Russell mothers across an ocean. From her apartment on North Duke Street, she patches through unreliable Internet phones to sing songs with a West African girl named Awa. Russell asks her adopted daughter, 8, if she has bathed and finished her math homework. She teaches Awa new words in English.

Russell signs off after 15 minutes or so, rolls her eyes to pull back a tear and takes out a book of court briefs and prepares for class at Duke University Law School.

"It's so hard to sit and talk and not hold her," Russell, 26, said after a call with Awa last week. "I feel like I should still be talking to her or I should be there. What am I doing?"

While millions of American mothers pull their children close today on a holiday that celebrates mothers, Russell will fret about a daughter who can't join her in the United States without a U.S. visa from the government. A maddening tangle of long-standing immigration laws keeps Awa apart from the American couple who adopted her in 2007 while volunteering in the Peace Corps.

To the West African nation of Togo, Russell and her husband, Michael Russell, are Awa's legal parents, young volunteers willing to adopt a child whose parents didn't want her. To the United States, Awa is a foreigner adopted by Americans through a means not sanctioned by U.S. immigration law.

To Awa (pronounced AH-wah), Russell and her husband are saviors, parents who promise schooling and holidays and food she can't yet pronounce. To Russell, Awa is a heartbreak of a gift.

In a few weeks, Russell will board a plane for Africa.

She has no return ticket. She won't buy one until she can buy two.

Girl adopts Americans

Lori Russell never meant to be a mother now.

She planned to finish law school first and pay down her student debt. She and Michael would settle into a house and get their careers in order. Then, she'd welcome a child into her life.

But sometimes, Russell has learned, a child picks her mother.

"She claimed us from day one," Lori Russell said. "She decided."

The Russells, childhood sweethearts from Elon, joined the Peace Corps after graduating from Emory University in Atlanta. In 2005, they were sent to Togo, a land where temperatures top 100 degrees in the hot season and villagers farm in dry, cracked soil.

At 5, Awa was the smallest of the gaggle of children who came to peer at the funny white Americans sent to teach their villagers how to better market their wares and manage their crops. By day's end, Awa had crawled into Lori's lap. Within months, Lori was scooping her a serving of pasta at their dinner table and filling a tub to bathe her.

Awa's family struggled, the Russells said. She was the youngest of her father's brood. Awa shared a home with siblings decades older and had lived there with another woman who also claimed her father as a husband. Her mother left before dawn, returning well into the night. Her father, already in his 70s, lingered at their compound, barely able to move his crippled legs.

Russell said Awa was left to fend for herself. She ate at friends' homes when their mothers had enough to share. She often turned up at the Russells' with a growling belly.

But it was the burns and bruises and bumps that troubled Lori and Michael Russell most. Awa said she'd been pushed into a fire by a sister and knocked on the head when she wouldn't hand over her dinner to a sibling.

'An indomitable spirit'

"She never complained," Lori Russell recalls. "She has the most indomitable spirit I've ever seen."

The Russells shuddered one night as Awa's screams pierced the still night air. They willed themselves to stay put, knowing if they barged into Awa's compound they would violate the culture's deference to letting families work out their own affairs.

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