The Story of our Trip Part 4- Thursday

Thursday, June 17, 2010-

Another beautiful morning in Ethiopia.  We were all excited and nervous this morning because we were going to visit Solomon and Tinsaye's birth mom.  We ate breakfast with the other families at the guest house and got dressed in nicer clothes.  The other moms at the guest house with us could really understand our nervousness because some of them had met birth families too and had varying experiences.  One family asked the American family to buy them a car!  It's a really complicated experience because most orphaned children in Ethiopia have living family members, they are just unable to care for them due to poverty and/or poor health.  Ethiopian children are treasured by their families and it is a difficult decision for a family to relinquish their children, but they know that the life they are giving their children by giving them up holds infinitely more possibility than anything they could provide them in Ethiopia. 

We walked to Layla House and the social worker, Elsa, met us there.  Elsa came with us to facilitate the visit by translating for us and making sure the kids understood that it was a final visit.  Solomon, Tinsaye, Brian, Elsa, and I got in the car with the driver, Sahid, and we left.  I knew the kids had grown up in Addis, but for some reason I thought it would be a long drive.  It was only about 10 minutes away from the orphanage.  We started out on paved main roads with sidewalks and medians, then turned onto a paved narrow road, then onto a dirt road, and finally onto a deeply rutted track full of people and animals and other cars and surrounded on all sides by tiny houses and stores constructed of mud, dung, tin, wood, plastic... pretty much any building material you can imagine.  As soon as we turned down this street, every person was staring at us and children started yelling, "Solomon!  Solomon!",  waving to him and Tinsaye in the car and running ahead of us (which wasn't hard to do since the road was so horrible we were only going about 3 miles per hour).  Tinsaye started giving Sahid directions and told him where to stop.  We got out of the car and I felt like I was in the middle of a PBS documentary on African poverty.  I also felt huge and shockingly white and really REALLY wished I had had my last hepatitis vaccine as we walked past open cookfires, through a rusted tin gate, over dirt and rocks, into a small courtyard for several tiny huts.  Two women came out (alerted by the band of children shrieking "Solomon") and the kids ran to them in a huge embrace.  It was their birth mom, Worke, and her sister.  Then birth mom turned to us and we all had an awkward minute of shaking hands, introductions, bowing, and then Brian just bent down and hugged her.  Immediately all three of us started crying and Worke kept saying "thank you, thank you, thank you" as tears streamed down all of our faces.  Elsa moved things along by saying, "let's all go in the house and we can sit and talk".

Solomon and Worke

So we all crammed into this tiny hut.  It was about 12x12 ft square, one door, one window, a big bed along the back wall, a cupboard on another wall, a tiny cookstove in a corner.  I was TERRIFIED that she was going to offer us coffee that we NO WAY could drink without getting sick and I was hoping Elsa would intervene on behalf of our wimpy American digestive systems, but she didn't offer us anything.  Whew!  She had several small gifts for the kids:  a Bible, a cross neckace, some candy, a CD of religious music, and some bootleg DVDs of Ethiopian movies!  They spent a few minutes talking and looking at the goodies, and then birth mom pulled out her photo album and we all looked at pictures of the children and their family members.  We took photos of all the photos for the kids to have in the future.  Then Elsa told the children to go outside and play so the adults could talk.

What we learned from our conversation, in addition to more info from the court files and the children, was this:  the kids' father was named Yeneneh.  He was blind.  However, his family had enough money to get him the accommodations he needed to finish college.  He had a degree and was a social worker for the Ethiopian government.  Worke was a high school graduate.  They married and had Tinsaye and Solomon and then Worke developed a heart condition.  Although her health was poor, they felt okay because they were a middle class family and Yeneneh could take care of them all.  Tinsaye was in public school and Solomon was in a private boys school.  They were Christians and went every week to the local Ethiopian Orthodox church.  In February 2009 Yeneneh was working in a rural area when he had either a seizure or a stroke.  He fell, hit his head, and died a couple days later.  In shock and grief, Worke knew that she was not going to be able to care for the kids on her own.  There are no social safety nets in Ethiopia:  no life insurance, no Social Security.  They were immediately evicted from their home and had to move into the hut we were visiting with her sister.  Yeneneh's sister and brother told her that they would take Tinsaye because she could help them in their homes cooking and cleaning, but they didn't want Solomon because he wasn't helpful.  Her own brother and sister encouraged her to get the kids into Layla House because they could stay together, they could get an education, and they could find an American family to care for them, especially since she could no longer afford the medication the kids needed to keep from developing glaucoma and going blind.  She had to make the agonizing decision for the good of her children to relinquish them to an orphanage.  They came to Layla House on November 6, 2009.  On that very day, halfway across the world, Brian decided, "I don't think this calling is going to go away... let's sign the application to adopt." and we began our journey to them.  When we put our stories together and discovered how God pulled us all together in this miraculous way, Worke said, "It is all in His hands and always has been."

Tinsaye and Worke

About this time I was thinking that there was a very real chance I was going to drown in my own tears from this unbelievably emotional conversation.  Right on cue, Tinsaye burst back in the room and said, "Let's have Oreos!"  We had brought a box of Oreos with us (we brought TONS of Oreos for the kids at Layla) and we all had a couple and then Tinsaye started handing them out to all the other kids lurking in a clump outside the doorway.  It was like Christmas and she got to be Santa Claus!  Elsa finally said, "Its time to go, they need the car back at Layla" and we began our goodbyes.  We started crying again and Her Highness Lady Tinsaye said very sharply to all the adults, "I say goodbye, but you moms no crying!  No more crying from you or you or you Dad!"  So we did our best to comply and made our way back to the car.  Worke talked to each of the kids individually, hugged them and hugged us and then we were driving away.  The kids never cried at all, if you can believe it.  I think they did all their crying months earlier and now they were focused on coming to America.  We knew they would eventually grieve the loss of their first family, but on this day, they were proud to be seen by everyone driving out of their neighborhood in a car, dressed in their bright new clothes, with their rich American parents.

When we got back to Layla it was lunchtime and we left the kids there for the afternoon.  Brian and I went to a nice restaurant alone to be quiet together, to talk about what just happened, to process our feelings, and to recover from all that crying.  We were completely drained.  After we ate, we went back to the guest house and took a nap before we got the kids again from Layla.  We just hung out at the guest house and took it easy for the rest of the day.  As intense as this day was, I would never trade the opportunity we had to meet Worke for anything.  Her example of unselfish love inspires me daily.