Adopting Helen
Written By Melissa Fay Greene
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Later I learned that in orphanages around the world, when children are summoned in Spanish or Russian, Chinese or Amharic, with the words "Your mother is here," the children sometimes think their first mother is returning. Even children who know that their parents are dead may thrill to a moment of magical thinking: "Mother is here!"
Helen had been tenderly loved by her parents. Her father had died when she was 2, her mother just a few months ago. At 5 years old, spared of HIV herself, Helen had been her mother's chief caregiver. Eventually, she would show me how her mother looked: She would recline on my bed, lift her head weakly, and speak in a hoarse voice.
She would recall being sent down the road with a coin to buy a bottle of juice for her mother. One day at the shop, she spied something she wanted very much: a pair of barrettes in the shape of butterflies. Knowing my child as I do now — knowing how she loves pretty things, how long she lingers in the hair products aisle of the local drugstore examining headbands and clips, the hours she spends with Lily turning the pages of teen magazines, braiding each other's hair, doing each other's nails — I can see this scene vividly. I see her weighing the heavy choice between purchasing the juice or the hair clips.
She bought the juice, sprinted home, and asked her mother if she could have the butterfly clips. Bogalech said yes. Certainly the poor woman had no pennies to spare, but she allowed her daughter to scamper back down the lane and buy the barrettes. This would become Helen's last happy memory of that time.
"We heard Helen's mother praying," a neighbor of the family would tell me. "She prayed to be allowed to live long enough to raise Helen to the age of eleven." Perhaps she believed that, by 11, Helen would have a good chance at survival, for orphaned children have a precarious hold on life. They fall prey to servitude, sexual abuse, disease, and starvation. Infected with HIV, living in a country too poor to import the life-giving medicines with the expensive patents, Bogalech hadn't prayed to live. She knew that was too much to ask. She had asked only to live a bit longer, for her daughter's sake.
"On the day my mother died, people came and took me away," Helen would tell me, "and I forgot to bring my clips. And I tried to tell them to go back, but I never saw my house again."
Yes, I've bought Helen other butterfly clips for her hair, and a butterfly necklace, and a T-shirt silk-screened with butterflies. There are things you can replace for your child and things you can't replace. I am a mother to my precious daughter, but I am not her first mother, and today's butterfly items cannot glitter with the beauty of those first clips that sparkled in the semigloom of a mud hut in which a gentle woman lay dying because she couldn't afford the medicine.
So now on our first morning together at the orphanage, Helen had been told "Your mother is here." Of course she did not recognize me as her mother, but she bravely climbed up into the taxi with me. Off we lurched to spend the week together with no language in common. An interpreter helped us by day. But at night, we were on our own.
In our adventures around the city — to buy clothes and shoes for Helen, to find lunch, to visit a museum — she scanned the ground for bottle caps. She pried them out of the dirt along the road. She dove under the table on the patio of a pizzeria.
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