Celebrate your child's love of learning

© Wondertime

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. 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. When we first arrived at our apartment, Helen got to work. She spilled the bottle caps out of all her pockets, assembled them on the kitchen counter, stood on a chair at the sink, and scrubbed them until they shone. She dried them tenderly and laid them out on the living room floor. I intervened when I saw Helen scaling the bookshelves to reach a tall candlestick, which I handed down to her. Back to the kitchen she ran with it. Then shyly, looking down, she took me by the hand, led me to the living room, and gestured for me to be seated on the carpet.

Delicately she took the candlestick, now filled with water, and poured the liquid into the many shining bottle caps, which she'd arranged on a shoebox lid for a tray. Then she lifted one bottle cap with two hands and presented it to me with a bow of the head. I understood! She had prepared the traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony. This is the birthplace of co­ffee, and the rituals celebrating its enjoyment are ancient. I bowed in thanks and settled onto the floor. With many sips and smiles of pleasure, we partook of our bottle caps of candle-wax-flavored water as the bright day turned to dusk beyond the balcony. I never tasted anything sweeter. At bedtime that first night together, I sat on Helen's twin bed and gently tried, through the blanket and sheets, to tickle her on the tummy. She churned and squealed with excitement and happiness. So I pulled down the blanket and pretended to ponder where to tickle next — I spoke aloud my dilemma, "Where shall I choose? Under the neck? The armpit?" Yelling "Armpit!," I lifted her arm and gave her a tickle. The delirium! The joy! The hysteria!

The next day, as we made our rounds to immigration offices and the American embassy for her visa, I had only to wiggle a finger at Helen to make her face light up with remembered laughter. On our second night, Helen hopped into bed, pulled up the covers, and waited. I lay on my bed reading. She laid her arms on top of the covers and looked at me. I was exhausted, jet-lagged, in need of a moment of privacy.

But she raised her arms a tiny bit, and spoke her first English word aloud to me. She said, quite clearly: "Armpit?"

I leapt to her bed and the ticklefest began. "She's so cute!" squealed Lily, when she finally spotted Helen coming down the corridors from the international concourse at the Atlanta airport. Helen accepted Lily's o­ffer to hold hands and scarcely let go for a week, except for the moments when she was hoisted up by her new daddy and big brothers. She clearly was dazed with excitement and happiness to be in America with her new family, but she was too shy to speak to anyone but Lily. She often stood on tiptoe to whisper into Lily's ear in a high tiny voice — in Amharic. Lily crumpled her face in empathy and nodded as if she understood. She did understand the basic fact: Her new little sister needed her.

"I can't stand it. I have to do something for her, I have to make her a present," said Lily after we'd put Helen to bed her first night in America. She rounded up a shoebox, paints, beads, and plastic necklaces, and created "Helen's Box," labeled as such. Creeping into Helen's room, she put it on the foot of the bed and tiptoed out.

Soon Helen began to warm to her other new siblings. Seth was enormously tall to Helen, but one day she snatched a sock off his foot and fled screaming with it. He chased her up and down the stairs. She sprinted past me, her face flushed with happiness, and threw me the sock to hide. When he finally ambushed her and pried open her hands, she cackled with laughter as he found she didn't have the sock anymore.

The next morning she tried his name. "Tzetz!" she yelled, then dove under the kitchen table with stage fright.

Helen's mother had taught her to read Amharic at age 4, English at 5. Seth and Lee found Helen one night that Þrst week studying an Amharic-English dictionary. Seth saw Helen was in the A's, so he pointed to a word: accountant. She read it in English, then Amharic, then got a pencil and paper and jotted down numbers.

He picked another word: abundance. She read it in both languages and waved her arms to display great quantities. "Give me that book," said Lee, suspecting a trick. Giggling, she handed it over. He flipped to onlooker. She shielded her eyes from the sun, and looked back and forth.

"My turn," I said, and showed her the word intelligent, to relay "You are." She put one finger up beside her nose in thought, then yelled, "Ah ha!" to demonstrate the word's meaning. But she was still too shy to speak aloud.

As the days passed, Helen began to speak aloud in English — but this wasn't always a good thing. "Mango!" she barked at me. Or "Cookie!" One bathtime, she demanded "Barbie!" three di­fferent times, each a flight of stairs away. She refused to add "please" or "thank you" to any of her demands. I grew weary of being ordered about.

After that bath, I presented her with 3-by-5 cards to insert in the front pocket of her overalls. They read: Please, Thank you, Sorry, Excuse me. "You don't have to say the words aloud, you can give me a card," I said, making allowance for her shyness and the newness of the language. Later, when she bellowed "Juice!" at me, I stood and waited.

She gazed back unflinchingly.

"You know what I need," I said.

"Juice!" she ordered again.

I shrugged. Sighing, she pulled the annoying cards from her pocket and examined them. Rolling her eyes, she handed one to me.

She had chosen "Sorry." I knew she'd done this on purpose, to hold her ground, but I accepted it. "It's not 'please,'" I said, "but it is a polite word, so I'll go get your juice." When I handed her the cup, she forked over the card that said "Excuse me."

Once or twice a day, she succumbed to waves of sorrow. No amount of gentle teasing or playfulness could head it off once it was time to grieve. We watched the little girl resist, then surrender to floods of tears and staccato sobs.

"Is she hyperactivating?" asked Lily, heartbroken at her little sister's sadness.

"Hyperventilating," I said. "No, she's just crying." "Why did my mother have to die?" Helen would cry. "I know why. Because she was very sick and we didn't have the medicine." "I'm so sorry," I said one day, rocking her. "I wish I had known you then. I wish I could have sent you the medicine." "But we didn't have a phone," she whimpered, "and I couldn't call you." Sometimes she said, "I'm getting you and my first mother mixed up."Once, she asked, "Do people in Africa live with people in America in heaven?" and then she got right to the point: "In heaven, will my first mother live with us too?"

A package came from Ethiopia one day: Helen's neighbors had sent us one photo of Helen's late father, Mohammed, and one of Bogalech. I made copies, hid them in my keepsake drawer for her, and wondered, Do I show her now? When she's older?

She found them immediately. Now she was the one who didn't know what to do with them. She tried to squish the photos into her pocket. So I brought home a wooden three-scene frame and put the earliest photo I had of Helen in the middle, between her parents' portraits. Then neither of us knew what to do with it.

Helen crammed the frame into her backpack and carried it back and forth to school for about two weeks. It was cumbersome. We set it up on her bedside table. She touched and arranged it often. She turned the photos to face her while she played on the floor. She carried the frame downstairs at dinnertime. Then she grew emotionally exhausted by the e­ffort.

"Can I keep it for you?" I asked, and then put it on my dresser. This was about more than the photos, I knew. It was about paying tribute to her first parents while attaching to her new ones.

"Do I have my mother's eyes?" she asked one day. "You do!" I said. "Look." I fetched the portraits. "You have your mother's eyes and her hair too and your dad's forehead."

At the end of Helen's first year with us, it came time to give her a Hebrew name, which often memorializes a deceased loved one with a name starting with the same letter. We decided to honor Bogalech, her Þrst mother, with the name Bracha. It means "blessing."

45 Million Orphans
I find the numbers utterly numbing. Some 25 million Africans are infected with HIV, and only a tiny fraction has access to the expensive, lifesaving medicines. When you add AIDS orphans to those left parentless by TB, malaria, malnourishment, drought, and war, the result is 45 million orphans.

Wealthy countries must try to solve the AIDS orphan crisis with aid, fair trade, and debt relief. Simply put: The world has to keep parents alive to stop orphaning kids.

Adoption is not the solution. It affects less than 1,000th of 1 percent of African orphans. But it is truly a miracle in the life of one child, and a marvelous way for a family to grow. To learn more about helping a child, visit thereisnomewithoutyou.com.