At the dentist

Neither Yosef nor Daniel had ever been to a dentist before.  The backs of their teeth were black.  Each sat a long time in the dentist's chair while I flipped through magazines in the waiting room.  I visited each boy occasionally, giving feeble pats on the arm in encouragement.  Neither had cavities.  "But their teeth are very worn down; they have no ridges; their teeth are like middle-aged people's teeth," the dentist said.  "It must be from eating something very hard."

"Did you eat something very hard in Ethiopia?" we asked Daniel, after Yosef had skipped outside to play with his prize, a bouncy-ball.

"Yes. Hard," he agreed in his sing-song voice.

"What did you eat that was hard?" she asked.

"Ice," he told the dentist.  "Ice very hard."

"You ate ice in rural Ethiopia?"

"Yes, very hard, ice."  He demonstrated how hard you have to bite to chew ice. 

"Ice? you grew up chewing on ICE in your VILLAGE?" I tried to confirm. (These boys had lived in a house of mud and grass, 50 miles from electricity.)

"Very hard, Ethiopia ice," he said, then went outside to try his bouncy-ball. 


pastoral Ethiopia

No wonder they've been hit so hard by Atlanta's heat wave this summer -- they're Eskimos!

By mid-July, day after day of 100-plus temperatures, I think both boys were wishing they'd read the fine print on the adoption paperwork. Perhaps they should have waited for a nice family from Minnesota or Saskatchewan to come along.  One day Yosef simply refused to go outside.  He had HAD it.  "In Ethiopia," mused Daniel, squinting into the distance to remember, "INSIDE hot.  OUTSIDE cool.  

"In America: OUTSIDE hot, INSIDE cool." 

If only I'd known their true history:  I should have been giving them very hard ice to chew on all summer.