Anatomy of a Care Package

First of all, a quick update on the adoption...a number of families (at least four that I know of) received court dates today! Yippee! Their first court date is scheduled for April 7th, right around the corner! What does this mean for us? Well, things are moving. Generally, dossiers are processed and court dates scheduled in the order that they are received (generally, not always) so when four cases go to court, our file moves that much closer to the top. Hopefully.

You've got to take every small celebration you can get! (0:

Anyways, on to the adoption dilemma facing me this week...

The only gift is a portion of thyself. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

How do you choose what to put into a one-gallon ziplock bag that will soon travel thousands of miles to be placed into your daughters' hands--mind you, these are daughters that you have never met? That is what I was faced with this week, and I am so lucky that this is actually the THIRD time I've been blessed with such a conundrum. You see, it is the tradition of our agency "family" that when parents travel over to get their child/ren, they take care packages for waiting parents' children with them. These packages are limited to one, one-gallon ziploc bag per child that should not weigh more than 2 lbs. For a parent it is a way of reaching out to your child, telling them that you are here and waiting for them.

All parents travel to Addis Ababa, for that is where you meet with the U.S. Embassy to get your child/ren's visa to travel back with them to the U.S. Our agency has two care centers, one in Mekele (northern ET) and one in Addis. For children living at the Mekele center, they are transferred to the Addis care center shortly before their Embassy date so that their parents can be with them during the week-long Embassy preparation time. They then get to travel to their new home once the visa is issued.

Our girls are at the Mekele care center. Not many parents make a side trip to Mekele during their trip to ET, especially since even if their children are from Mekele, they will have been transferred to Addis by the time the parents are traveling. So, on the rare occasions when someone does travel to Mekele (usually to see and learn about the area that was an important part of their child's life), the parents of waiting children living at Mekele get the chance to send care packages that will be delivered directly to them by another parent...and it is a BIG DEAL!!!!!!!!! Yes, we can always send packages with parents just traveling to Addis, but it sometimes will take more than a month to get to Mekele, and it is not given to them by another parent (i.e., someone who understands how emotionally important that little plastic bag is and what it represents to the giver). We have been lucky in that since the first moment we signed the paperwork, families have visited Mekele regularly. For nearly a year, our girls have had to sit aside and watch their friends receive bags while they received none. Their first bags were so huge for us, as we hoped they were for them. It was our family reaching across the miles between us to say "you are loved...we are here, waiting, for you. Yes, you."

So, three times I have sat in front of bags trying to stuff shoes, clothes (every picture of Tse that I have shows her wearing clothes that are too small!), treats, books, hair bands (I never knew there was so much stuff out there that you can torture a girls hair with!), etc. Do you know how much fits into a one-gallon bag???? Not much. So I have had to do triage. Usually a shirt and pair of leggings makes it in, one book, some little candies and gum, a photo album and ALWAYS a letter from Colt and I and some hand-drawn cards by the boys (I talk them into drawing hearts instead of lightsabers...it's a tough battle...).

This last bag was a surprise, since the family traveling did not think they would have room and suddenly found space. They leave next Weds., and I found out Weds. night. So, yesterday was a mad adventure of bag stuffing.

How do you stuff your love into a one-gallon bag?

Seriously, how?

I want the girls to know how I love them so much that I physically hurt that I cannot be with them. I ache that I cannot protect them, cannot kiss their hurts or make their eyes light up with joy. I--who am rarely at loss for putting words on paper--cannot even tell them this in a letter for they do not even read, much less speak my language! I put pictures in albums, but for all I know they're just thinking "why am I getting pictures of these weird albino people and their dogs (eeek!)?" There have been stories that some kids have come home unprepared for what was occurring--they had been told they were going to come to America, make money, then come back to ET. Who knows what our girls have been told? How are the nannies truly to even know how to prepare the children when they have never seen America, never met the parents or might not really understand the whole process. When the children are transferred to Addis, most Mekele kids speak Tigrinya, not Amharic, and all the nannies in Addis speak Amharic, not Tigrinya, so even they (who see the parents come and go through the Embassy process) can't explain to the girls what will be happening.

So how do I prepare them for all the changes that are going to occur in their life soon, and fit it into a one-gallon bag? Hmmm? Well, in the second care package I included a picture of each one of the family, girls included, with the Tigrinya word for brother, sister, mother and father under each respective picture. Hopefully it will prompt one of the nannies to explain if Tse cannot read that. In the most recent package I included a flow chart with pictures of Colt and I flying on an airplane to ET (picture of girls and the country of ET), then a picture of Colt and I and the girls flying on a plane to Utah (pictures of the state and country). The pictures were labeled in Tigrinya (mother, father and daughters) as best I could do, and at the bottom I put pictures of all of us--boys and girls and dogs included--smooshed together and put "Forever Family" in Tigrinya underneath. Do you think it might get the message across? I don't know, but it was my best try with only a few hours notice. It's now on it's way to Iowa, and then on to the girls next week.

So these are some of the frustrating things that you have to deal with...trying to fit your love in a one-gallon bag. But, whether they understand it or not, they WILL understand it soon, and I guess that matters more than anything.

So, to leave you with a thought...what would you put in your one-gallon bag to a son or daughter you had never met but loved dearly?????