East Meets West

I spent my weekend in Columbia MD (wow...what a blast from the past! I even drove by my old apartment...) at a great China adoption conference. There was so much information, but all of my reading really helped prepare me for the shock that many of the families attending felt. Adoption starts with tragedy; regardless of how you look at it, it is not a good start for a little kid. They lost their birth family, and when we pick Makena up, she will also lose her SWI caregivers. It is our job to make her transition to us as smoothly as possible. We will smell funny, look funny, and sound funny to her. Not the kind of transition a typical one-year-old is used to! We will do our best though...she is probably much more resilient than her parents!

While I met SO many great PAP (prospective adoptive parents) families at the conference, there were two people in particular who I will never forget. The first was the president of our agency. She is amazing and after speaking with her (she knew who I was and asked me how Charlie was doing...and before you say anything, she was standing in the hall and had nothing to reference...I simply couldn't believe that she would know our names - she really takes all of her families into her big family), I feel a new sense of hope. That probably isn't the right word, but she made me feel so good about our choice to adopt and about little Makena. Mak is a "Fu Baby", which is how they refer to all of the kids referred from the Fuzhou SWI.

While I wasn't able to meet Mak's SWI director, the second amazing person I got to meet was the director from a province just south of Jiangxi. He was fantastic, and although communication was strictly through translators, his giant heart really came through. He spent almost an hour speaking in front of the group about his kids. It struck me that he said his wife hated him having the orphanage director job...ever since he took it he has spent all of his time at "work"! It was a blessing for me to see and hear an actual orphanage director speak of his experiences...he did talk about wanting all of the kids to get adopted because an orphanage was no place for these small souls to grow up though. What a great man!