(unabridged version)
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Five-year-old Helen at her orphanage, 1995
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Last week, Helen Samuel of Atlanta, Georgia, age 10, stepped foot in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for the first time since her adoption five years earlier.
She was in the spring of her marvelous fourth-grade year. She held school-wide elective office and had taken blue ribbons in both the school Fun Run and the science fair. She was a flutist, a jazz dance student, and a soccer player, She could read and understand Amharic (though she’d grown too shy to reply aloud to Ethiopian-American adults) and her lavender bedroom was full of Ethiopian maps, art, and literature. Our Ethiopian babysitter prepared traditional foods every day for Helen, and a bevy of cute girlfriends often joined her after school, digging eagerly into her injera and spicy wat with experienced fingers.
Spring Break in Ethiopia, Helen hoped, would refresh her Amharic and give her limitless access to Ethiopian food. She also looked forward to shopping.
“Addis is not exactly a shopping mecca,” I’d warned my stylish daughter.
“There’s no Target in Addis. There’s no Limited Too.”
But, she reminded me, on the first day we’d met, in November 2001, I had taken her shopping. The tiny orphanage child, in dusty overalls and outsized rubber flip-flops, had stepped into a clothing boutique and felt transformed. She’d whirled about and sent the salesgirls running. Within the hour, the little girl pranced from the shop in red plastic sandals, lacy white socks, hair ribbons, and a blue wool dress embroidered with fluffy sheep.
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Now, five years later, Helen exited Addis Ababa’s international airport wheeling a new pink-and-black suitcase, with headphones draped around her neck and an Ipod in her pocket.
She accepted the traditional bouquet given to returning Ethiopians and descended by battered rental van into the tumultuous city, where bumper-to-bumper taxis compete for right-of-way with herds of goats, donkeys, sheep, and cattle.
Suddenly, at the first red light, an adult beggar loomed at Helen’s window. He pressed his disfigured bent-back arm, sprinkled with dislocated fingertips and finger nails, against the glass. Helen screamed and fell backwards against me. She covered her eyes and couldn't look until long after we pushed a worn white paper birr (11 cents) through the window and driven away.
At the next intersection, street children mobbed the van, inserting their fingers through the slightly-lowered window. Some tried to sell us packets of tissue, one birr apiece. “Hello; tissue,” called the young voices. “Hello; soft.” A tall boy leaned close to the glass and said: “Stomach, zero.”
“Give! Mommy, give!” cried Helen, ransacking her backpack in search of money. “I don’t like this! They scare me.”
Although my chief concern about this trip had been Helen’s face-to-face confrontation with the worst poverty on earth, I hadn’t prepared her for it. “There’s no Target,” had been the closest I got to trying to remind her of what she knew of Addis Ababa from earliest childhood. She’d lived alone with her widowed mother in a house she once described as the size of my office washroom. “We owned two things,” she said. “A baby-bed and a shelf. The bed was too short for my mother.” In the last year of her ill mother’s life, Helen, age four, had been her chief caregiver.
But my husband and I wanted Helen to treasure Ethiopia for its magnificent culture and history, for its wealth of languages and literature, and for the good qualities of its people; so we’d rather skimped on details of violent modern regimes, and we’d failed to mention the country’s global ranking at the bottom of every socioeconomic ladder.
Had five years of happy American family life, in a tree-lined Atlanta neighborhood, displaced Helen’s memories?
They had.
“I don’t remember this,” she murmured, gazing in awe through the van windows at the dry hot landscape and dusty throngs. “I don’t feel like I came from here.”
The failure of Ethiopia’s economy, health-care, and education is everywhere on display. Unemployed, sick, handicapped, and congenitally-disfigured people—blind, leprous, tubercular, AIDS-infected—limp or lie or crawl about on the sidewalks, in the parks, on the median strips. Homeless children dash alongside the heavy traffic. Two-thirds of school-age children are not in school and over a million children have been orphaned by HIV/AIDS. There is great beauty in this country—the rocky mountainous landscape, a hilltop city perfumed by eucalyptus trees; there is history here so ancient it reaches beyond Biblical epochs to touch the dawn of human life. There is affluence here; there are professionals in late-model Mercedes, marble mansions sporting satellite dishes, law schools and medical schools, bookstores and art galleries, folklorists and poets, economists and dissidents.
But, at eye-level, for a tenderhearted little girl, there are beggars.
In her backpack, Helen found a bag of bite-size Milky Ways. When the van stopped again, and a ragged street boy approached, Helen gingerly served him a gold-wrapped candy through the window. He examined it, looked up sharply, and requested another. “For Brother!” he called, holding out his hand. The herd of sheep had cleared the roadway and the van was accelerating. “His brother!” cried Helen, “he needs a candy for his brother!.” But we were already jerking and honking our way down the street. She burst into tears. “Please, please, go back!” she begged the driver. “Let me out, I’ll run back, please!” But there was no turning around and, again, she fell back against me, covered her eyes, and wept.
“Is Ethiopia very rich or very poor?” she asked us.
And: “What makes a country rich or poor?”
She grew suspicious of my efforts to point out the occasional monuments to development—the sudden office tower surrounded by hovels, the glass-and-neon shopping-strip concealed by the dust of construction and of trotting donkeys. “I know, I see it,” she’d say about a modern-looking store, “but did that beggar have eight fingers on his hand? Was he born like that?"
Helen’s dreams of adult life have included Olympic competition, a modeling career, and/or the practice of medicine. Suddenly her dreams were changing. “I’m going to come back when I’m older,” she told me firmly, “and open a beautiful shelter for all the beggars. Like Oprah’s school. But for the beggars.”
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We spent every day at an orphanage. It wasn’t Helen’s orphanage, but was similar to the milieu in which we’d found her: a world of children who’d lost their parents, typically to HIV/AIDS. Many children grieved the loss of their brothers and sisters, as well.
The older girls— from about 8 to 14—instantly surrounded Helen with curiosity. They assessed her haircut, fingered the quality of her fine hair, familiarly examined her wristwatch and earrings, and then led her by the hand to their dorm room. “I don’t really understand what you’re saying,” she protested in English, but they didn’t believe her. On the cement floor of a plain room filled with bunk beds, they drew her into a circle on the floor and marveled at their catch. They peppered her with questions. They examined the contents of her purse. They looked through her camera. They borrowed her hairbrush. They took turns trying on her earrings. They made their needs known. “We have to get each of them a bottle of shampoo and a bottle of conditioner,” Helen announced the next morning. On another morning, she needed to buy a bracelet for each girl. By mid-week: shoes. They all wanted shoes just like Helen’s pink Crocs.
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Four other of our then-seven children had come along on this trip: (Lily, 14, Fisseha, 12 (also from Ethiopia), and Jesse, 11 (born in Bulgaria) flew with us from Atlanta; Lee, 18, joined us from his studies in Israel). Lee, Lily, and Helen led a mission out the orphanage gates and down the street to a shoe kiosk, where every child in the orphanage was fitted with bright plastic Chinese knock-offs of Crocs, ten birr a pair.
Meanwhile, Helen was falling in love with a little boy. His name is Binyam. He is three. Each morning, at Helen’s approach, he stopped, squatted down, and made a fierce smile. Then he rode in her arms the rest of the day. He laid his head on her shoulder. He dozed there, in the sunshine as she cradled him on the steps. She whispered endearments to him. She kissed his warm head.
“We have to adopt him,” she informed us.
“You know we can’t, Sweetheart,” I said.
“Please, Mommy, please. Please. I’m not kidding.” Her face and voice were desperate.
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We were already in the process of bringing home two older brothers from this orphanage; their arrival would bring our total number of children to nine.
“Mommy, he needs me.”
“I hope someday you and your husband will come back to Ethiopia to adopt,” I offered lamely.
“No,” she whispered, tears starting to fall. “Binyam will be too old then.”
Helen was soaking up Ethiopia. She welcomed the hugs from the teachers at her old orphanage who remembered her; she lowered her eyes and smiled at the many compliments from strangers; she feasted on spicy stews; she swayed and clapped at dance performances; and she tore up the field in orphanage soccer games—nothing middle-class American about those skills.
Squeezing our way through the stalls in the huge open-air Mercato one day, she asked, “Why is everyone staring at me?”
“They’re staring at you because you’re holding MY hand,” I replied, speaking as a middle-aged white woman in sunglasses, wearing a camera bag.
“Oh!” she cried. Almost instantly, she released my hand, skipped ahead, and blended into the market crowd. I heard her sweet voice call over her shoulder, “No offense, Mommy!”
By the end of her Spring Break week in Addis, Helen was sitting up straight and alert in the van when we crossed the city. She held birr notes in one hand, candy in the other. If, at a red light, beggars didn’t jog towards us at the sight of white faces among the passengers, Helen tapped on the glass to catch their attention, unusual behavior for a tourist.
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She did go shopping, but it was for the kids at the orphanage. When she planned ahead, it was to open her great shelter for the beggars. And when she sobbed inconsolably on our last day, at the last farewell, it was for Binyam and for the older girls, sweet children with histories just like her own, but with futures that looked starkly different.
See more photos from the family trip to Addis!
