Melissa Fay Greene: "I Found 12 Million Kids I Couldn't Leave Behind"
Written By Lexi Walters
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Melissa Fay Greene, the author of "Adopting Helen" in our February/ March 2007 issue of Wondertime, is a two-time National Book Award finalist for Praying for Sheetrock (Random House, 1991) and The Temple Bombing (Random House, 1996) who has reported on topics including international adoption, the African AIDS crisis, civil rights — and balancing writing and parenthood. Since Helen's arrival, her family has adopted a son, Fisseha, and is awaiting the arrival of two more adoptive sons, Yosef and Daniel, all from Ethopia.
We caught up with Melissa as she was on tour for her new book, There Is No Me Without You (Bloomsbury). (Click here for an excerpt.)
Melissa's family, shown, above left:
Top row: Helen, Lee, Andy (Molly's boyfriend)
Middle row: Lily, Fisseha, Molly, Seth
First row: Jesse
Melissa, you've adopted five children internationally in the past seven years. What was the impetus for you to begin adopting in the first place?
We've endlessly enjoyed raising our children — four children by birth — and when the oldest prepared to apply to college, we had a feeling of empty-nest panic: only three children at home! We lightly talked about adopting, I got online for the first time and typed "adoption" into a search engine, and was blown away by hundreds of photos of small children waiting in orphanages around the world. In 1999, shortly after Molly turned 18, we brought home 4-and-a-half-year-old Jesse from a Bulgarian orphanage.My husband, Don, told people we were "back-filling." I explained that it was because we'd already invested in every Lego set and really hadn't gotten our money's worth yet.
As our second child, Seth, began thinking about college, we joked that we ought to adopt again and it was around that time that I was stricken by news reports of Africa as "a continent of children." Twelve million sub-Saharan African children had been orphaned by AIDS; adding in the numbers who lost their parents to malaria, TB, war, and hunger brought in incredible estimates, like 45 million orphans.
Could you adopt an orphaned child from an African country? I wondered. I first approached the African orphan crisis not as a journalist and author (I'd published several books by then and worked regularly for a number of periodicals), but as a prospective adoptive mother.
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