Adopting the Older Child - Part 3

The road out of Awassa on our way to Arbegona.

We arrived at the guest house after 11 p.m. the day of our arrival in Ethiopia. We needed to be up at 4:30 the next morningj to prepare for our 6 a.m. departure for our birth family visist -- a trip that would take us away from Addis Ababa for a day and a half. The staff offered to wake Teshale up so we could meet him, but that seemed cruel, so we declined. We would wait out the 36 hours. We thought we were going to wake up at 4:30, but it turns out that in Ethiopia, Jan. 29 is the Festival of St. Mary -- a holy day -- and the calls to prayer from the orthodox churches around the guest house began at 4 a.m., instead of the usual 6 a.m. The prayers might be soothing and somewhat charming, if they weren't broadcast through loudspeakers. That just makes them annoying.

Our driver appeared and loaded up the Land Rover with us, another family, and some medical supplies, and we were off. We dodged -- goats, donkeys, trucks, camels, buses, and cows -- and bumped our way to Arbegona, in Sidama. The last seventy kilometers -- a little less than 50 miles -- were on dirt roads, increasingly narrower and bumpier, and with the quintessential Africa stream crossing sans bridge. Just drive through the water and the road continues on the other side. We'd traveled more than 24 hours, gotten less than four hours of sleep, and then had traveled five hours to reach our birth family visit location. I was fried, and relieved we were finally there. Except...not. We were simply picking up a local government official who could translate from Amharic to Sidamic, and then we had another 15 kilometers -- nine miles-- to go to get to the village where the visit would actually take place.

We finally made it though, and once there were ushered inside a square single room mud hut with one door, no windows, one table, one or two chairs, and one bench. We were introduced to T's uncle, Alemu. We still knew nothing about our child or his personality, so our questions weren't what they would have been had we had the chance to spend a couple of days with him prior to the visit.We were filming the interview, and knew that some day Teshale would be watching, so we didn't want to ask any questions that might have hurtful answers.

We were very curious why only T was being placed for adoption, and not his older or younger siblings. It just seemed odd. Why a middle child? Why not the youngest child? Why only one? Why not two? We wish now that we had asked those questions. You get just that one short chance to get the answers to everything you are ever going to wonder, and you need to just throw the questions out there, no matter how hard they are to ask or how difficult the answers might be to hear. In terms of what we got for what his uncle wanted for T's future, we got, "To go to school, study hard, become a doctor, and come back to Itiopia to help his people." Pretty much the stock relinquishment answer.

One question we thought to ask was the meaning of his name. We were told "the best" or "above all the others." The children are given nicknames until they approach school age and their personalities and talents become apparent, so it seems likely that whoever named him thought highly of him. That has given us hope that he was relinquished because he showed great promise that his family knew they would never be able to fulfill, as opposed to the possibility that he was just too much of a handful for his relatives to care for. Actually I now know that the person he considered his 'ama' or mother may not have wanted to relinquish him. One night while we were snuggling, T told me that his mommy in Itiopia was holding on to him and wouldn't let him go the day his uncle took him away to the "big house." He said Gashe -- his name for his uncle -- had to tear him away. "Oh," I said, thinking of how traumatic this must have been for my little boy. "Was she crying?" "No," he replied. "She screaming."