Forever Family From Africa to Oregon;
the long journey home.
Are these our children? Annee stares at the little faces on her computer screen. The photos that the adoption agency has e-mailed to her are tiny, barely bigger than a postage stamp. Y is going on six, with a shy smile and unruly pigtails sprouting from the crown of her head. Her brother, P, is just over a year, but looks directly into the camera with black velvet eyes.
Annee had always known she wanted a big family. As an only child, born to aging parents, she wanted her kids to have siblings to play with when they were young and lean on as they grew up.
She married Bob, her college sweetheart, a month before her 21st birthday; but the marriage
worked. After eight years, a cross-country move, and two little blue-eyed boys, they still loved one another. She'd had an unexpected pregnancy while N, her youngest, was still in diapers, but lost the baby after just a few weeks. She decided it just wasn't God's will that she bear another child. Their family was complete. Then, last Easter, as she stood at the mall gazing
dreamily into a shop window crammed with candy-colored dresses and miniature hats, Annee felt a twinge of sadness. She wanted to buy these foolish dresses for a little girl. She wanted to braid hair and dress baby dolls and shine tiny patent leather shoes. "We should adopt a little girl from China," she said to Bob, in a tone that she could pass off as joking. He looked at her for a moment, no hint of a laugh on his face; "We'll have to pray about that." They'd talked abstractly about their openness to adoption when they sat fidgeting in front of their pastor during premarital counseling. But to bring a child into their home now? They still owe on a mortgage and student loans. Annee doesn't work outside the home. They would have to cash out a retirement account to afford an international adoption. Annee just started home schooling two rambunctious little boys - one learning to read and the other still figuring out the mysteries of the toilet. It was a brochure from an adoption agency that finally made up their minds. Annee sat at home one afternoon, enjoying a cup of tea and a blessed break during a boys-only outing, and dripped tears all over the pictures of small children with spindly chicken legs and bellies distended from hunger. She didn't even notice that her boys had bounded into the room until Caleb, her oldest, sidled up beside her. "Mama, what's wrong?" Annee explained that the little boys and girls in the pictures didn't have mommies and daddies. "Why can't you guys be their mom and dad?"
The decision was made. Like nearly 300 of their fellow Americans, the G's would adopt a Liberian child this year. International adoptions are on the rise, and Liberian adoptions are among the fastest-growing, increasing tenfold in the past five years. Celebrities like Madonna and Angelina Jolie have made adoption from Third World nations, particularly those in Africa,
front-page news. In fact, the week Annee and Bob bring their children home, the cover of US Weekly blared notice of Jolie's third overseas adoption. But rarely does the coverage delve deeper than the joyful homecoming.
After three months of jumping paper hurdles, Annee looks into the eyes of the two dark-eyed babies who could be hers. She has just a few days to decide whether to commit to loving and caring for these children for the rest of her life; and all she knows about them is their birthdays and the fact that they aren't infected with HIV - with the caveat that many Liberian kids are a
year or more older than their "official" birth certificates say. She's done her research. She knows these children could have learning disabilities or serious emotional problems. She knows they could suffer from malaria or hepatitis. One woman she's been chatting with online traveled to Liberia last year only to watch her son die in the local hospital. Annee worries about how they'll feel growing up with skin the color of burnished bronze in Oregon, where they're likely to be the only black kids on the block. She weighs whether they should change Y's African name.
She wonders if P will be able to bond with her after months of being passed from nanny to nanny in the orphanage. She fears that Y, who is old enough to remember her mother and her home, has seen too much to ever feel like a part of their American family. And she worries about the little things, like who will teach her to weave tight braids into Y's kinky hair. But the worries begin to dissolve as she gazes at the little faces. These are her children.
Wednesday, November 29: e-mail from Oregon
Subject: News
It is official ... our adoption is final in Liberia. I spoke with D the office assistant today and we
were told to apply for our visas and to plan on traveling in about a month. Now of course this is
Liberia so I don't know if the month will really turn into four. :) But we are in the final stage and it is VERY exciting.
Liberian children adopted in the United States are the last chapter of a long and circuitous tale. Nearly 400 years ago, hundreds of their ancestors were loaded onto slave vessels bound for the Americas. Two centuries later, several ships full of free slaves returned to Africa to found the continent's first black republic. But the new nation of Liberia, which declared its independence in 1846, was hardly utopian for the hundreds of thousands of native Africans who had lived
on this stretch of the Atlantic coast. Tribal descendants were disdainfully known as "aborigines"
and wouldn't be afforded the right to vote for 100 years. This historical caste system, exacerbated by decades of poverty brought on by corrupt leadership, nurtured bitterness and disillusionment. In 1980, a tribal leader pulled off a violent military coup to become the country's first dictator. Nine years later, Charles Taylor's brutal regime assassinated him and claimed power, forcing the country into a civil war. A generation of Liberian children knows nothing but war and its bitter aftermath. Y, born two years before the ceasefire, is one of them.
A quarter of a million people died during the 14-year war. As many as 20,000 children were forced to join militias - killing, raping and maiming other children. Thousands were orphaned. And in the four years since the war ended, countless others have been given up by
parents who can't afford to feed them. In Liberian tribal culture, "pawning" - offering
village children to city dwellers both in repayment for a debt and to offer the next generation a road out of poverty - was common for much for the country's history. Modern American adoptions are seen in much the same light. Mothers may surrender baby after baby
for adoption when their milk dries up. For many women, this is the only family planning option they have. P and Y's birth mother is a tiny woman who, at 26, barely comes to Bob's shoulder. She's delicately pretty in a best dress the day she meets the Americans who've come to take her children away to a better life. Her hands bear the scars of working long hours in a fish market, but she doesn't bring in enough money to keep rice on the table. They have just a few fleeting moments together at the orphanage - time to give her photographs of their home and family in Oregon, to tell her in Liberian slang that Y will have "plenty dresses" in the United
States, and to thank her. Nothing is said of the father, but Y's name is evocative of the thousands
of babies born to soldiers and the women they took by force - the biological spoils of war.
In a tribal dialect, Y means "for the sake of the child."
Monday, February 12, 2007: e-mail from Salem, Oregon
Subject: Can you hear the shouts of JOY?
We are going to Liberia!! There is no rhyme or reason somehow in this crazy system our kiddos' passports slipped through. I have to wait until talk to D again to book tickets but we will leave a week or two from today!
Sunday, February 25: e-mail from Monrovia, Liberia
Subject: We're here!
Well PRAISE GOD we made it. We will definitely have stories to tell. But it's late and HOT. Pray for us as we meet the children tomorrow.
The moment they step off the plane, a soggy wall of cloyingly sweet night air makes it clear that Liberia is like nothing they've ever known. The G's have never traveled outside North
America. They've never visited a place where the unemployment rate hovers above 80 percent, where less than a third of people can read and where electricity is a luxury taken away for three hours each afternoon. Dazed and jet-lagged, they walk across the tarmac to a tiny building - more of a shack, really - that houses the immigration services; and enter utter chaos. They
just stand, frozen in the middle of the melee, their stomachs sinking for several silent minutes; then a man gestures for their attention. "I'm F. Give me your passports." Bob looks him up and down. He's a short Liberian man in his 40s, impeccably dressed in a pinstriped suit and a big gold cross pendant. He's cordial, but not overly friendly as he consults a printed out list of
names that includes "G." "I don't really have a choice. I have to trust this guy," Bob thinks, and against his better judgment, hands over the documents and says a silent prayer. Moments later, the jostling crowds are no closer to the windows, but the G's passports have been stamped, and their luggage approved. They obediently follow F - worker of minor miracles - out to the street. F leads them to a driver who promptly disappears to go fetch his truck, leaving the G family standing in the dust with three footlockers full of clothes and toys and diapers for the orphanage. A crowd of men, maybe a dozen, maybe more, swarms the couple, each speaking very fast in the peculiar English that evolved from the plantation dialect of the country's founders. The aggressive crowd swells, each man hoping to make a buck from the wealthy Americans. Annee's blood pressure starts to rise. She starts to sweat. "What would they do if they knew I have $1,800 in cash on me?" Bob thinks over and over again. The driver pulls up in an old pickup truck, and every man struggles to get a hand on the trunks as they're heaved into the bed; then demands to be paid. Bob pulls out a wad of ones as the driver begins to shout. "Get in the truck! Get in the truck! Get in the truck!" That, they understand. It's nearly an hour's drive from the airport to the home on the outskirts of Monrovia where the orphanage has arranged rooms for Bob and Annee. Annee and Bob stare silently out the windows. Paved decades ago, the highway seems to be losing its battle with nature. In nation the size of Virginia, only 300 miles of its roads have ever been paved. The capitol city, Monrovia was wired for electricity just three months ago, and rural areas still have to make do with gas lamps and fire. Cruising through the night at freeway speeds, the driver dodges yawning potholes and careless villagers with the same swift motion, keeping one hand on the wheel and the other on the horn. He points out deposed dictator Charles Taylor's house as though it were a tourist destination. They pass through several United Nations checkpoints, concrete barriers guarded by stone-faced soldiers who keep their automatic weapons trained on the car. Through the dirty windows they see a broken-down
convoy of UN trucks surrounded by a boisterous crowd. They think of the State Department warning they read before leaving home; "Poverty is endemic ... Foreigners, including Americans, are high-profile targets for robbery . US citizens should avoid political rallies or street demonstrations, as such gatherings have the potential for turning violent." They pass aisles of tip-tilted little three-sided shops with peeling paint and rusty corrugated tin roofs, elbowing one another for precious space on the dirt boulevard. Finally, they pass though a steel gate. The home is intimidating: a concrete fortress surrounded by a ten-foot wall topped with coils of barbed wire and shards of broken glass. A UN tank is parked across the street. But their hosts, missionaries from the Midwest whose daughter works at the orphanage, are warm and welcoming. Whether the security is a remnant of the civil war that ended just four years ago or a barrier to some more immediate threat is unclear. The G's aren't sure they want to know the
answer.
Monday, Feb. 26: e-mail from Monrovia, Liberia:
Subject: G happenings.
"Liberia is currently VERY hot! Today I am wearing a knit skirt and it is now at least three inches longer due to the moisture in it. Last night I felt like a rotisserie chicken spinning in an oven as I tossed and turned in bed."
"Well, I do not know where to start ... I could write a book I think about the last 24 hours . He (P) has a funny habit of shutting his eyes to block out the world. I think it is his way of coping with all the weirdness going on. Y has been very quiet. We get little smiles out of her. Though we feel incredibly blessed to have them as part of our family now our hearts are breaking because of the sadness we see in them.
Annee and Bob chose Liberia for many of the same reasons as the hundreds of other couples who adopted from the country last year. Liberia has thousands of children in need, so adoptions are relatively simple. China requires that adoptive parents be older than 30 and has even started vetting prospective parents based on their weight. Adopting from most Eastern European orphanages costs in excess of $20,000 per child. A Liberian adoption might be half that much. And most Liberian children speak at least some English, though the dialect - a plantation slave's tongue left to stew with African tribal dialects for 200 years - is challenging. Consonants disappear. Exclamations of "oh" and "dem" pepper sentences. Some estimates say that Liberian and American English have only a quarter of their words in common. Since the war ended, Liberian adoptions by Americans have increased tenfold. Some attribute the interest to the countries' shared heritage and language. Some say cost is the critical factor. Others cite the explosion of Christian mission work in the country since Taylor was exiled in 2003. The country is about 40 percent Christian, with evangelical denominations like Baptist and Pentecostal attracting thousands of war survivors with the promise of being born again into innocence. After a few hours of exhausted sleep, the G's go to meet P and Y at the orphanage, a squat white concrete building emblazoned with Christianity's call to service from the book of Matthew: "Whoever welcomes a child like this in my name welcomes me." By daylight, the town seems less threatening, abuzz with men pushing wheelbarrows full of produce and women wrapped in the bright patterned sarongs known as "lappas," babies tucked into the ridges of tightly bound cloth at their lower backs. Women are balancing plastic buckets of water atop their heads and the men zipping by on bicycles far outnumber the cars. The little kiosks that line the packed dirt street on
the way to the orphanage seem in constant peril of tumbling onto the shoppers bargaining for rice or fabric. To American eyes, they're more like dilapidated garden sheds than centers of commerce. At one point, the driver steers the orphanage's Land Rover up and over a burning garbage dump in the middle of the street. The Christian orphanage, like so much of Monrovia, is
secured behind a wall. Despite the precautions, however, the orphanage was robbed in December. Palms and rubber trees shade an aging monkey in an iron cage outside the door. Cloth diapers and a rainbow of tiny shirts flap on clotheslines as a local woman, one of the orphanage's "nannies," scrubs the orphans' clothes on a washboard. Another nanny prepares rice and cassava (a nutritionally doubtful but filling porridge that makes up the bulk of the Liberian diet) over an open fire. After traveling nearly 7,000 miles to meet their children, the G's are overwhelmed by a storm of contradictory emotions. They're exhausted and
terrified and overjoyed all at once. Annee - whose feelings are usually close to the surface - just goes numb. Bob snaps pictures of Annee taking P into her arms. The little boy stares at her suspiciously, then burrows into her chest and closes his eyes. He doesn't sleep, just makes all the strangeness go away. Y poses on the bunk that she's shared with another girl for six months, long skinny legs tucked up under her as she snuggles a new baby doll. She fingers her new pink plastic pony and tries out the sound of "ma" and "pa." She hovers close to Annee and Bob, but doesn't say much. They hug her, but don't force anything. It's hard to know what to say to this little person. They show her photographs of their house and their car, of C and N and her new grandparents. They spend a lot of time just looking at her as she plays with the other girls. The orphanage calls the G's her "forever family." As she says goodbye to her friends, her nannies and her homeland, it's impossible to tell how much she really understands.
Sunday, March 4, 2007: email from Oregon
Subject: Pictures
This is a picture of all four G children eating breakfast! Yeah - we are home.
After ten days in Oregon, P still hides his face sometimes. Six-year-old Y is wetting her bed. Both children are taking pills for the giardia parasite they carried home in their intestines. The
family spent most of their first week together running back and forth to the doctor's office to tackle malaria and respiratory problems and infected heat rash and endless stinky diarrhea.
P has already gained three pounds; but neither child will touch milk and both little brown bellies
still protrude - the ironic badge of malnutrition. Annee takes Y shopping at the local Wal-Mart, and the little girl can't stop staring at the piles of strange food. Her special request? Meat. Every morning. Annee rubs down their arms and legs with Vaseline, and massages cocoa butter lotion into their hair. Their skin, accustomed to 80 percent humidity, hasn't adjusted to Oregon weather or hot-air heat and is cracking and peeling like desert soil. C and Y, who is now the oldest G child by just six months, struggle for supremacy, bickering over toys and snacks. When Annee holds P in her lap, N runs over to rest his head on her knee, jealously guarding his place as her baby. In a rare quiet moment, Annee sits hip-to-hip with Y on the couch, reading a picture book about farm animals.
"What's this?"
"Hoss!"
"Yeah, that's a horse. How about his one?"
"Geut."
"Right. You have lots of goats in Liberia."
Y giggles as she points at a drawing of a goose gliding over a small pond, and gleefully says
something that sounds like the French word for dolphin- "dauphin" - over and over again.
Annee shakes her head with a bemused smile and wishes the knew what her daughter was saying.
"Have you ever seen these?"
"Ket!"
"No, it's not a cat. It's called a squirrel. I don't think you have those in Liberia."
Bob interjects from across the room; "Sure they do. They're called lizards."
Annee tries to spend a little time with each child every day. She straps P to her back in a sling.
Reminded of the lappas back home, he drifts into a contented sleep. She works on reading exercises with C. She plays with N and tells him that she loves him. Most of the time, though, her boys play telephone line-worker on one side of the room while Y sings an African song to herself and builds a Lincoln-log tower a few feet away. P sits quietly on the rug, running a matchbox car over his bare foot and regarding the others suspiciously with wide black
eyes. Soon, they'll feel more like a family. Annee saw a glimmer of what the future could hold one recent afternoon when Bob opened a footlocker full of presents from Liberia. C and N jostle to peer inside, scrunching up their noses at the smell of Africa - a blend of spices and sweat. Bob pulls out "fine African suits" for both boys, and they struggle to pull on the baggy tie-dyed
tunics and drawstring pants made of stiff waxed cotton. C's is green, N's blue. P has a tiny brown and tan suit that Y picked out at the market in Monrovia. Bob pulls a purple and white tie-dyed
tunic with gold embroidery over his jeans and T-shirt and wiggles his shoulders. It's sized for a
linebacker. "This is really comfortable." Annee laughs."African Bob." Bob holds up a length of patterned pink and green fabric. "Hey Y - what's this?" She brightens and runs over. Sometimes, the little girl expertly ties a scarf around her waist and tucks her new baby doll snugly against her lower back. "Lappa!" N finds the fat carved wooden sheep from the G's new Liberian nativity set." "Hey Yah-oh look!" Three little heads, two blond and fuzzy, one striped with tight black braids, meet over the trunk, pawing through the clothes and the masks and drums and beads that Annee and Bob bought to remind the children of their homeland. Annee just smiles and rubs a sleeping P's now-chubby little leg.
No comments:
Post a Comment