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.
For readers considering international adoption, what would be your best advice for choosing a location from which to adopt?
The country of origin is less important than making a good match: what is the child's prenatal, postnatal, and early childhood history? Will this child be able to adapt to the hopes and expectations of the parents? A child with a traumatic early history or with a particular developmental or physical challenge needs parents willing to accept and to nurture him or her.Countries get reputations for having more- or less-challenged children eligible for adoptive placement. Such generalities are not relevant. You need to learn about a specific child. You need to see the medical reports, photos, a video, and you'll want to have those materials screened by an American pediatrician specializing in international adoption medicine. You'll want to know what key risks are posed to children in different regions: is the child at special risk for fetal alcohol syndrome? For hepatitis B? For HIV? Children with these diagnoses can be joyfully adopted and lovingly embraced, but parents are entitled to know in advance. Reputable agencies will not surprise you.
You'll want an agency director who knows the children personally. Agencies will provide you with photos of waiting children. Try not to fall in love with a photo. If you start to fall in love with a photo, ask yourself, "What would this child look like when throwing an all-out, no-holds-barred tantrum?"
I shy away from photos with captions like "She is said to be a very smart girl."
"Who has said this?" I wonder. "Who knows this girl?"
Prospective adoptive parents must do their homework! They must carefully research the adoption agencies they're considering: Is the agency licensed in the countries it claims to have permission to work in? In the vast online networks of adoptive parents, what is the reputation of the agency? Have complaints been filed against the agency in its home state? There are fraudulent operators preying on prospective adoptive parents, yet there are also plenty of reputable and ethical agencies. Find one of the latter.
Many — perhaps even most — parents enter the adoption world in search of a baby. Especially a baby girl. In many countries, there are long waits and waiting lists for baby girls. Yet, in those same countries, often in the same orphanages, older children wait. Children of 2 or 3 years of age, or 5, or 7, or 12, watch the baby girls come and go. Who wants an older boy or girl?
The older children can do marvelously well in adoptive homes. Of course you'll want to ask: What is the history of the child? How did she lose her family? Has she been loved?
A child who has known love will be eager to love again. A child who has not experienced much love — a child raised in an institution — will need to learn what a family is, what parents are. Such a child is not a hopeless case, but parents must proceed knowledgeably, pushing aside the little angels and hearts embellishing the adoption agency website or brochure.
Two years ago, my family adopted a 10-year-old boy from Ethiopia. Of our seven children — four by birth, three by adoption — Fisseha has been in every sense the easiest transition.
I tell people now: You should simply start your family with a 10-year-old Ethiopian boy.
He is loving, helpful, eager to learn, handsome, bright, and a spectacular athlete. He wasn't used to being hugged, so at first, he ran from hugs. Lily, two years older, used to chase him through the house, threatening to hug him. Then, when Fisseha saw what it was, he stood very, very still if a hug was coming his way. Sometimes he'd position himself nearby, arms at his side, waiting for a hug. After about a year, his arms began to go up to return the hug.
We are in the process now to bring over a pair of brothers, ages 10 and 12, from the foster home described in There Is No Me Without You.
I know the boys personally, and I also, in a more general sense, know who they are: fine, intelligent, gentle Ethiopian boys, traditionally raised to respect their elders, value schooling, work hard.
Of course we'll spoil them, unfortunately. Fisseha, who easily covered 10 miles a day or more as a goat-herd in Ethiopia, sometimes asks us to drive him the three blocks to school ("Because backpack heavy") and, sometimes, we do.
It's clear from your Wondertime article that the relationships among your adopted children and those born to you are ever-evolving ones. How has Helen embraced — or not embraced — her new siblings?
Our oldest three children are all out of the house now: Molly's in San Francisco, working for ForestEthics.com; Seth is a senior at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music; Lee is on the Young Judaea Year Course in Israel and will start Oberlin College next fall.At home we have Lily, 14, Fisseha, 12 (from Ethiopia), Jesse, 11 (from Bulgaria), and Helen, 10.
It's endlessly true that I am not more or less surprised by the adopted children than by the birth children. Each child is unique. Helen is the most like Molly and Seth, in being a driven student and musician. Lee and Fisseha share devotion to sport; Lee takes Fisseha along when scrimmaging with baseball or ultimate [Frisbee] friends. Lily loves her circle of friends, and they often include Helen in little parties. It gets noisy, and even my major rules, like No Playing Soccer in the House, No Fighting over Food, and No Roller-blading in the House, sometimes get broken.
But there's a lot of nurturing. Seth tutors Helen, by long-distance telephone, in the long Hebrew prayers she's mastering. Lee e-mails advice about high school to Lily, from Israel. Seth does math with Fisseha over the phone. Somehow it all just works.
As a journalist, you write frequently on areas of the world in crisis. Can you comment on the initial reactions you have upon reporting in areas with high concentrations of orphans?
My new book, There Is No Me Without You, attempts to reply to this question. There are scenes you see from which you never recover. My glimpses of the boisterous, joyous, resilient children of Ethiopia, who all had lost their parents, has sparked in me a sense of lifelong commitment. I hope your readers will visit the book's website: thereisnomewithoutyou.comHow have your recent travels for stories affected your decisions to adopt?
I have lied to my closest friends and relations for many years.Since the people closest to me were stunned when I gave birth to our fourth child, Lily, I feared their reactions to the news that we were about to adopt one.
In 1999, on the verge of flying to Bulgaria to meet Jesse, I convinced The New Yorker to send me as part of a feature article I was writing for them.
"Oh, she found a little boy she just couldn't leave behind," my friends and relatives surmised about my visit to Bulgarian orphanages, which produced both a New Yorker feature article and, suddenly, 4-year-old Jesse. So I let them think it.
When, in 2001, we moved towards adopting a child from Ethiopia, The New York Times Magazine sent me to Ethiopia, to write about the African AIDS orphan crisis.
"She found another child she just couldn't leave behind," said my friends.
And, two years later, when Good Housekeeping agreed to let me write a story about a foster mother in Addis Ababa, and, soon thereafter, a 10-year-old boy named Fisseha appeared in our house, people said, "Oh, she saw another child she couldn't leave behind."
It was all sort of true. It was just that, in Africa, I'd found 12 million children I didn't want to leave behind.
You wrote in this article for Wondertime, though, that the way to combat the epidemics of orphaned children can't be through adoption alone.
Adoption is not the solution to the orphan crisis in Africa. Twelve million orphans of AIDS, added to the numbers of children who have lost their parents to TB, malaria, hunger, and war results in inconceivable estimates, like 45 million children having lost their parents. Last year 688 of them were adopted by American families. This represents 0.0001 percent — or one hundred-thousandth — of the numbers of orphans.No matter what the media reported about Madonna — that African babies are the hottest trend since Hermes handbags — 1/100,000 is not a trend and does not address the problem.
Nor would we want it to. One continent cannot adopt another continent's children. AIDS in Africa will be beaten back only when the rich world begins to treat Africa fairly, paying decent wages for labor and fair prices for raw materials; allowing African manufactured goods to enter our borders; and sharing even a tiny fraction of our GNP with a continent we've plundered for 500 years.
But adoption is one answer: It's a marvelous option for adults who want children — or more children — in their lives, and a miracle for the children plucked off the streets and out of orphanages and restored to family life and school.
On the frontlines of the orphan crisis across sub-Saharan Africa, the newest thinking is to find approaches that keep children close to home — in their extended families, with their grandparents, or with neighbors. Old-school "orphanages" are a less relevant answer now than support for local adults willing to care for the orphaned children. Organizations like the Firelight Foundation seek to reach out at the grass-roots level, to sustain children where they are living.
Do you ever fear that you're losing journalistic distance if you cover an area that you're adopting from?
Yep. I pretty thoroughly lost my journalistic distance from this story, from the moment I found myself able to steer major financial support to the heroine of There Is No Me Without You, a middle-class, middle-aged foster mother in Addis Ababa.The welfare of the children in this little foster home instantly surpassed, in importance, any notions I might have had about journalistic distance. Yet the monies I steered towards Mrs. Haregewoin changed her life, the situation of her scores of foster children, and thus the story I was reporting.
It all took a bad turn when her financial windfall began to look suspicious to her neighbors, who hatched all sorts of rumors and theories (like "child-trafficking") to explain why Mrs. Haregewoin suddenly had the money to lease two nice houses and to buy a used van.
Rumors and suspicions built upon real evil happening within her walls, unbeknownst to her (child molestation by an employee), resulting in Mrs. Haregewoin's calling me in December 2005 from prison. This was NOT the book I'd set out to write, and her phone call threw me into a major panic.
First I made certain her children were safe and cared for; then I had to tell my publisher that I would NOT be turning in a finished manuscript on December 31, 2005, and that in fact I could no longer tell if the book could ever be finished.
We had several very dramatic and unhappy months, Mrs. Haregewoin and I; hers, of course, were worse, as she was in an Ethiopian jail. I was simply storming around my house in Atlanta saying, "Who IS she? I've been writing about her for several years now, and she's like a stranger to me."
I did manage to finish the book several months later, but it takes more surprising hairpin turns towards the end than I'd anticipated.
Learn more about Melissa Fay Greene, her books, and her adoption resources at www.melissafaygreene.com.
Click here to purchase There Is No Me Without You by Melissa Fay Greene.
