I get dozens of wonderful emails and letters every week. I keep thinking I should post some. Some ask key questions about adoption.
Here's one, followed by my reply:
Dear Melissa:
> I am greatly touched by your experiences. My husband, my six year-old
> daughter and I would love to adopt from Ethiopia, but our social worker thinks
>that a child from Africa would not feel comfortable in our Southern California
>home because there are not enough black children in the neighborhood
>although I know of at least five families with adopted children from Africa...beautiful,
>warm, well-adjusted children. Is love not enough?
>Thank you for your time and consideration,
SG (who gave permission to publish)
My reply (at greater length here):
I think love gets you most of the way there, but connections with other people of color, especially with Ethiopians, are vital.
Picture an over-turned world, your six-year-old daughter orphaned, all extended family gone, a kind couple with one child from central Ethiopia adopting her. There are no Americans, no white people at all in the village, but they are a kind and loving couple that says color doesn't matter to them. "We're color-blind," they say.
What would you want for your daughter?
You'd want her to be adopted by these people, rather than grow up alone in a California orphanage. But perhaps you'd be grateful if the couple would search out Americans in the vicinity; hire an American babysitter to speak to your daughter in English and prepare Pop Tarts and macaroni-and-cheese and bring over Sesame Street videos. You'd like to see her enrolled in a school with kids from all over the world, including perhaps British, Russian, and Greek children. You'd hope her new parents would create a lifestyle that wouldn't make your daughter stick out as exotic transplant on every walk to the market or the river. You'd want the nice parents to fit so nicely into the new diverse world they create with your daughter that they are not congratulated, every where they turn, on the grand thing they've done by bringing in a poor little white girl. You know your daughter would overhear such remarks and may begin to wonder if her presence is the result of a humanitarian action more than because she was a much-wanted little girl.
The new child you adopt will be your very own child, with no other parents to fend for her or him. Think about what will make the child feel welcome and not strange. He or she doesn't want to be an ambassador of color at every religious gathering and school event; he or she does not want to be the one human being that makes an all-white assembly "diverse," your child doesn't want to be so-and-so's little African child, not even so-and-so's cute, athletic, and well-adjusted little African child. Your child just wants to be your great and gorgeous son or daughter, while YOU take care of the net-working that allows the child plenty of access to Ethiopians, Africans, other people of color.
We're lucky to live in Atlanta: we're in majority-black schools for middle and high school; all school principals and many teachers are African-American; we have a middle-aged Ethiopian babysitter; and we have afternoon babysitters from Morehouse College, the historically black men's college in Atlanta. Thanks to our regular sitter, the kids always have Ethiopian stews simmering on the stove for them, and a bag of fresh injera on the counter. Thanks to the Morehouse guys, the boys absorb African-American styles of basketball, dress, speech, and the young men's attention to academics. (For urban black music, especially hip-hop, they need look no further than their white older brother Lee.)
In Atlanta, there are Ethiopians, and Ethiopian markets and restaurants and shops and festivals everywhere we turn. There's an Ethiopian soccer club that the kids occasionally join for a scrimmage. There are Ethiopian kids in Ethiopian families in the school district. We've NOT been able to do all this -- we've not been able to do ANY of this -- for our Bulgarian-Roma (Gypsy) son, Jesse, and he notices, and he feels the vacuum. But I believe our Ethiopian children--especially since there are now four of them in our family--feel secure in the knowledge that they are part of the Ethiopian diaspora. The three boys speak to each other and to the sitter in Amharic. (Helen lost her Amharic, despite the sitter's presence in the household. It took adopting a pair of brothers to bring Amharic down to the everyday kid level.)
One of our kids' favorite places to eat is at a Chinese restaurant at the food court of North DeKalb Mall, a mall which is a popular destination for Ethiopian-Atlantans. Why? (It can't be the food I don't think!) They enjoy it because a young Ethiopian woman works there, and she has taught her Chinese co-workers conversational Amharic, so the Chinese servers greet my Ethiopian children in Amharic, and in Amharic they order their fried rice and their egg-rolls. An American scene.
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| Helen--at home in many worlds |
