Adopting Helen
Written By Melissa Fay Greene
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Few things on earth are as alarming as approaching the gates of a foreign orphanage, knowing that inside awaits a child who is going to call you Mama.
In November 2001 my taxi driver honked for admittance, and drove me into the compound of an American orphanage in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. With pounding heart I stepped onto a dusty sunlit playground and prepared to meet Helen. Months earlier, my family had done the adoption paperwork that matched us with this 5-year-old girl.
Our family then consisted of two birth daughters, Molly and Lily (20 and 9), two birth sons, Seth and Lee (17 and 13), and our son Jesse, 7, adopted from a Bulgarian orphanage two years earlier. Jesse had arrived the year Molly began applying to college. My husband, Don, told people we were — backfilling — as each child grew up and left home, we'd bring in another. While our second-born, Seth, prepared to apply to college, we were joking about adopting again when dark headlines about the ravages of AIDS in Africa caught my eye.
The media was calling Africa "a continent of children." Twelve million children between the ages of newborn and 15 years had lost their parents. I knew that adoption was not a solution to Africa's orphan crisis — one continent cannot adopt another continent's children; but I also know, from experience, that adoption works miracles in the life of a single child. So we made inquiries and filled out applications, met with social workers and immigration officials, and were accepted as prospective adoptive parents by Adoption Advocates International (AAI).
In an AAI newsletter we saw a photo of a wide-eyed little girl with a headful of beaded braids who was touching a forefinger to a front tooth, a gesture of shyness. Lily seized the newsletter and ran about waving it and yelling, "This is our new sister!" She made it clear to everyone that she was not planning to grow up in a house with four brothers.
The other kids agreed that Helen was adorable. Although we thought it was too soon to tell Jesse (nothing was finalized, after all), Lily felt there wasn't a moment to lose. She gently broke the news to him. He began to shout excitedly: "I going be big brother! I bigger him. I faster him!" "Does the name 'Ethiopia' ring a bell?" said Don. "You not faster him. Him faster you."
There was uproarious happiness in our house when we found Helen could be ours.
Yet as I got out of the taxi and prepared to meet her, I was terrified. Big kids were pushing a little girl with huge eyes and beaded braids across the playground toward where I stood. I had to lean against the taxi for support as a dizzying sensation of "What have I done?" engulfed me. But there she was. She was afraid to make eye contact. She touched her front tooth with her forefinger. I bent down to hug her and felt her trembling. She too was terrified. Excited, happy, but terrified.
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