REPLY: The Timeline, or How Family & Professional Lives Entertwine

REPLY: The Timeline, or How Family & Professional Lives Entertwine

21/11/2006

In November 2001, I flew to Addis Ababa for the first time with two tasks: one was to report, for the NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, on the state of some of the world's children orphaned by AIDS.
The other, private, task was to meet a five-year-old girl named Helen.
She had lost both her parents, was living in an orphanage, and had been matched with our family for adoption.

She would become the sixth child in our family, and the second by adoption.

When our oldest, Molly, had turned 17 and began to think about college, we had been shocked.
It seemed that everything we knew and loved about family life was coming to an end.
With a feeling of empty-nest panic, we had looked into adoption.
In 1999, a few weeks after Molly turned 18, we brought home a four-and-a-half year old Jesse from Bulgaria.
My husband, Don Samuel, explained to our friends that we were back-filling.
I told people it was because we'd already invested in every Lego set and I didn't think we'd fully gotten our money's worth out of them yet.

In 2001, Molly was in college, but Seth, our second-oldest, was making noises like he was going to grow up, too.
"But we haven't renovated the basement yet," I protested to him, but there seemed to be no stopping him.
At that time, the newspapers were full of terrible news from Africa: 25 million people infected with HIV/AIDS; the failure of the rich nations and global drug companies to act decisively to turn back the pandemic; the resulting millions of children -- perhaps as many as 12 million in sub-Saharan Africa -- left without parents.

Can you adopt a child from Africa? I suddenly wondered.
Could we adopt one of the twelve million orphans?
So I first stepped into the world of the orphaned African children not as a journalist, but as a mother.
I inched close to the global crisis with the thought: Could we bring home one of these children?

Five-year-old Helen appeared in a newsletter of "waiting children" mailed to us by our adoption agency. She had huge eyes, a high forehead, and a head full of beads and braids; she was adorable.

Our daughter Lily, then age nine, seized the adoption newsletter the day it arrived and ran through the house waving it, yelling, "This is my new sister." The other kids all agreed. Although we thought it was a little too soon to tell Jesse, since an adoption can take most of a year, Lily took Jesse out to the porch and explained the situation.
He burst back into the house all excited:
"I going be big brother! I bigger him. I faster him!"
"Do the name 'Ethiopia' ring a bell?" my husband replied. "You NOT faster him."

Adoption is NOT the answer to the orphan crisis in Africa -- perhaps we can talk more about this later -- but it is a miracle in the life of an individual child, if all other options have failed the child.

My NEW YORK TIMES story about the children appeared on 12/22/02, entitled "What Will Become of Africa's AIDS Orphans?" [http://www.melissafaygreene.com/pages/articles.html]

The tremendous response to that article inspired me to visit the subject again, for another magazine; and Helen's fantastic, joyful, loving transition to our family inspired us to adopt again.

In the fall of 2003, I returned to Ethiopia again with two tasks: one was to meet a ten-year-old boy named Fisseha, who had been matched for adoption with our family; the other was to report for GOOD HOUSEKEEPING about a foster mother named Mrs. Haregewoin Teferra. She was a middle-aged middle-class widow who had opened her doors to orphaned children and had been over-run with them. She was a modern There Was An Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe.

THAT magazine article ("Hope Lives Here," October 2004) also generated a beautiful response from readers and inspired me to stick with Mrs. Haregewoin and try to tell the story of AIDS in Africa and the millions of orphans through her eyes.
 

Melissa Fay Greene
Author of Praying for Sheetrock (1991),
The Temple Bombing (1996),
Last Man Out (2003),
There Is No Me Without You (2006)

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