First Meeting
Now that a lot of the basic information about our journey to Ethiopia has been shared, I want to go back and share some more details about specific days. We’ll see how this goes…
Friday (9/18) morning, we visited our adoption agency’s main Ethiopia office. In addition to finalizing paperwork, we also got a crash course in Amharic, the country’s official language. There are over 80 different languages and dialects used in this diverse country, but Amharic is the language of choice in Addis. We learned words like “good” and “beautiful” and “thank you,” although it took most of us in the travel group several days to remember how to say thank you. Fortunately, we discovered that clasping your hands together (like in prayer) and slightly bowing your head does communicate gratitude as you try to stumble through the word you just can’t quite remember.
We piled into the two vans and drove back to the hotel. Although, this time we didn’t stop at the hotel. We went to the Care Center, which was immediately adjacent to our hotel. This was it. It was the moment we’d dreamed about and prayed for since we took the first real steps of this journey almost a year ago (our hearts had been preparing for this moment for a much longer time than that). And now it was finally here. I think it all felt rather surreal – until the van stopped, the doors opened, and it was time to get out and go inside to actually meet our children.
The Center was nothing like I’d expected. I’m not entirely sure what I expected, but I know it wasn’t like this. I guess I envisioned a small shack-like building with maybe three rooms total. It wasn’t like that at all. The Center is much larger, more colorful, and cleaner than I’d seen in my mind’s eye. And I can’t say enough about the staff that cares for these children. They love them. It’s obvious. The love these children. If you want to see a few more pictures from the Center, slip on over to Our Adoption Journey and check out the Hutchison family’s perspective. While we had hoped to be in the same travel group with them, we wound up missing each other by two weeks.
They gave us a quick tour of the facility and I don’t really remember much. I was more concerned about meeting our Little Mihret. They told us that at the end of the tour, we’d have to figure out which one was the child we’d been waiting for over the past long, agonizing months.
She wasn’t there.
We figured out later that none of the children whose parents were in our Travel Group were in their rooms. They had them hidden away somewhere (how sneaky ;)). So, we went through the rest of the tour, anxious to return to the room and finally meet our Little Girl!
And when we saw her for the first time, there was absolutely no doubt that this was our Little Girl!
Christy got to hold her first. I shared those pictures earlier. You can see them here. Mihret was rather unresponsive, as we expected. She was pretty clueless to what was going on. She is only two, after all. Within ten minutes of Christy picking her up, Mihret fell asleep in her arms. While we wanted to play with her and get to know her, at least she wasn’t screaming her lungs out whenever we tried to hold her. It was also touching to know she was comfortable enough with her new mom that she could fall asleep so quickly. Later on that day, we wondered how many times she’d actually fallen asleep in someone’s arms in the recent past. Like I said earlier, the staff at the facility loves these children. But there’s only so much one-on-one attention you can get in an institution like that – even with a fabulous group of caretakers.
We arrived shortly before lunch time. While Christy was holding Mihret again, one of the nannies pulled up a chair and motioned for Christy to sit down. We tried to feed her for the first time.
Yeah.
That didn’t go so well.
She fought each bite Christy tried to give her. The nanny stepped in and tried to get her to eat. No dice.
We discovered that we might have another strong-willed child on our hands. She’s mellowed out quite a bit when it comes to food. In fact, she loves to eat. Most of the time. Every once in a while that temper still comes through, though.
We left the facility shortly before the kids’ nap time. Although we knew we’d see her again shortly, it was still very difficult to leave. Mihret didn’t help matters very much. She cried when we put her down in the crib. She didn’t want us to leave. You could argue that it’s comforting that she didn’t want us to leave. And that’s true. But we had to leave. And none of us wanted that to happen, to be quite honest.
But we knew that the day was coming very soon where we wouldn’t have to leave her like that again.
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Hooray for first meetings! Wow, there is not much that compares is there?
Nope. Not much. It certainly leaves you speechless!