Three months after an unexpected citizenship hurdle left him stranded in Kenya with his newborn daughters, a single dad from Toronto is happy to be back home and learning what fatherhood is all about.
“I am tired, but I love it,” Joseph Tito told CTV’s Your Morning Thursday.
Tito’s twin daughters, Mia and Stella, were born via surrogate on Nov. 30, 2018. He met them shortly after their birth, getting a brief chance to hold them while they were in the neonatal intensive care unit.
“Walking in the hospital was the greatest feeling. I was so happy and proud,” he said.
The girls were released from the hospital without significant complications. Getting them home proved to be much more difficult.
Tito was shocked to learn that his daughters were not automatically Canadian citizens. Citizenship laws changed in 2015 to exclude children born outside Canada to parents who were themselves born outside Canada, even when the parents are Canadian citizens.
Because Tito was born in Italy, the law change applied to him. He had to work through the Kenyan court system, with help from Canadian diplomats, to get permission to take Mia and Stella home.
The twins are currently considered stateless. Tito has been given approval to sponsor them, and hopes they will be granted permanent residency next month. After that happens, it will take about a year for the girls to become full-fledged Canadian citizens.
“Everything was a fight and a struggle [but] I would do it again, a thousand times over again, for these two,” he said.
“No matter what struggles I have gone through or will go through, it will be worth it.”
