Always there

You are always there. Always, always. When A gets a note from his teacher praising his hard work, or scores a goal in soccer, or argues with me, you are there. When D makes up a song, or sounds out a word, or asks why? for the millionth time, you are there. I tell the kids how proud of them you would be. I do little things for you, like make sure they eat Ethiopian food with their right hand and never touch pork (I don't know if you would actually care). You are always with me.

Except you are not. You live only in my head, and the danger of living in my head is that you become an idea. You start to evolve into "noble" and "selfless" (Do you know how often the word selfless is used by adoptive parents to describe our children's first family? A LOT.) I more-than-half believe that you saw something in these children and wanted more for them than a life in rural Ethiopia could give them, and that's why you entrusted them to us.

Then I come back to reality. It hits me that I don't know if you are noble or selfless. Maybe you are. Maybe you're cheerful, or impatient, or loyal, or lazy; maybe you are, you know, an actual human being. I don't know who you are. But I know one important thing about you: you are desperately poor. You didn't take the children to an orphanage because you had a vision for their future. You might have sent an adolescent away to fulfill his potential elsewhere, but not a three-year-old and a five-year-old. You took them to an orphanage so they could eat three times a day. This is desperation, not nobility.

The you in my head is proud. The real you... I don't know. Probably very sad.

Photos at last!

We started trying to send photo albums to a family member in Ethiopia a little over a year ago. It's hard to do, when the person lives three hours from a paved road, has no post office nearby, doesn't have a means of transportation, can't read, doesn't have cell phone reception or a cell phone, and lives in an area where our agency no longer works. We tried a couple of different options, including going through our agency, but were not successful. We call a neighbor in Burjii every few months - we can reach him when he goes to market and is within range of a cell phone tower - and each time the answer has been no, no photo album. Finally a friend was able to work something out and very generously let us add a photo album to hers. Then someone I have only met online got on a motorcycle and drove through flooded roads to deliver the album. Tuesday when I got home from work I checked my email, and there they were, photos of our family member holding pictures of our boys. We are thrilled!