Julie Gumm - Author

Why are kids available?

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The first portion of our adoption training last week (after introductions) was talking about why kids in Ethiopia are available for adoption.

There are reasons like extreme poverty as we expected but we learned a couple interesting things about their culture and the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Their culture (and I think this is prevalent in Africa, not just Ethiopia) believes that it is wrong for a husband to have s*x with his wife while she is pregnant. Therefore, it is deemed “acceptable” for him to go and satisfy his needs elsewhere and this is when he often contracts HIV/AIDS.

The child is born (HIV free, of course) and then the husband and wife resume s*exual relations and he, of course, passes the disease on to her. Months down the road he gets sick and the wife suddenly realizes that she too probably has HIV/AIDS and after her husband dies is left to find someone who will care for her children.

We got to watch an interview with two separate women who had come into the AWOP offices in Ethiopia in hopes that they would find someone to take their kids. It was heart wrenching to watch this mom’s despair and hope combined. I don’t think there was a dry eye in the place.

One mom brought in her 3 oldest (of 5) children – a 15 yr old boy and two siblings. She wanted homes for them and would keep the younger children with her. In a second meeting they told her they found a home for the two youngest kids but the family did not want the older boy. They boy said he would give up his chance for a life in America if it meant his siblings could go. But the mother held on and said that wasn’t acceptable. Luckily they found another family that would take all 3.

Another interesting cultural tradition that contributes to adoptable kids has to do with remarriage. If her husband dies and a woman finds a man to whom she can marry, he WILL NOT accept her kids and she has to give them up. In the opposite case, if it is the father who is widowed, he can bring the kids into a new marriage but most likely they will be severely abused by their stepmother because they are not her own.

I cannot imagine the anguish with which these parents (or in our case grandmother) struggle with as they love these children enough to try to help them find a better life.

Price-cutting

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So I told you how we got our hotel on Priceline.com for $45/ night.

Now I know how they can afford the low price…

Don’t spend money on one of those fancy key envelope holders when a sticky note with the room number will do.

Hey, at least we’re not right by the ice machine. That’s were we usually are 🙂

The Box

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Daddy is finally home from Africa and boy are we glad! He’s really wiped out and went to bed at 6:30 tonight – but hey, we made it to church this morning which I wasn’t sure about.

The question of the day around our house is “When do we get the box?”

This would be the box with the ashes of our dog who died on Friday.

When I told the kids that Snickers had died, one of their first questions is what happens to her next. Noah wanted to bury her in the backyard so I had to explain that it was against the law to do that.

“So what do they do with her?” he asked.

(And yes, I know there are pet cemeteries but I’m not about to pay upwards of $500 on a burial for a dog…as much as I loved her.)

So, in my “honesty is the best policy” mode I said “They cremate her.”

“What’s that mean?”

How exactly do you explain cremation to an 8 year old and 5 year old that doesn’t make it sound horrific? Because really “They stick her in a big fire and it burns until she turns to ashes” is just awful sounding. Somehow I managed to make it sound slightly better than that but they were still horrified by the idea.

It was then that I took a deep breath, pushed aside my “financial peace angel” (you know the one that sits on my shoulder and tells me not to overnight my adoption papers), and said “We can have them put Snickers ashes in a box and then we can bury the box underneath the big tree in Pa and MeeMaw’s backyard.”

That seemed to console them somewhat.

It was an extra $130 to have the remains returned to us in a simple box, but if it gives the kids some sort of closure than I think it’s worth it. I thought we could make a little memorial stone to mark the spot where we bury the box.

So the vet’s office will call us when THE BOX is ready for pickup. Not sure when that will be.

…here’s a picture from the vault – this is about 10 years old…in her spry days.