(CNN) — Malawi’s decision to reject pop star Madonna’s adoption of a local child has reignited global debate about the ethics of international adoption. Some international aid groups have praised the decision as best for the child, a 4-year-old girl named Chifundo James. “I think it really highlights the bigger picture that there are so many children living in poverty in Malawi, and while Madonna has good intentions … children would be better off staying in their own communities whenever possible,” said Karen Hansen-Kuhn, policy director for ActionAid USA.

To get another perspective on the situation, CNN talked with Melissa Fay Greene.

CNN: What’s your initial reaction to the news that Madonna’s adoption of a Malawian child has been rejected?

Greene: Surprise. … It was awfully tricky with Madonna’s first adoption, when the child turned out to have devoted family members nearby. [The singer’s adoption of a Malawian boy was finalized last year.] And if that’s true with this child also, it seems a similar sticky situation. That’s not the situation for the majority of orphanage children around the world, who don’t have caring grandparents or aunts and uncles a short walk or bike ride away.
[Read more…]

At Lily’s high school soccer game yesterday, I sat in the bleachers in my sunglasses and hat—a new hat, shaped like a baseball cap but made out of straw.

I do not look good in a hat, I know this. Hats squeeze my head into an alarmingly narrow look, upsetting my children. But the sun was dazzlingly bright, so blinding I could barely see the game. And I thought this new approach, this compromise between a straw hat and a baseball cap, might work. On the far side of the field, sophomore Lily sat on the bench with her team-mates. My phone buzzed, announcing a text message. I opened the phone and found a message from… Lily!

It said: “Mother! Take off that hat RIGHT NOW.”

Without a word, I handed the phone to the mother sitting nearest me, and she passed it to the next mother, and, all the way down the row, mothers of teenage daughters merrily laughed and sympathized.

The sun went behind a cloud. I took off the hat.

Yosef, age 10 (and very cute), provoked Fisseha, age 13 (and very strong), who slugged him. And threatened to hit him again if he kept being a pest. Yosef came weeping and whining to me, and made a great point of showing he feared for his life. All this happened at the dinner table at a lovely Erev Rosh Hashonah dinner at our friends’ elegant and art-filled house. Our friends smiled compassionately. What cranky children; I felt we were doing something wrong.

We made it home that night, and everyone dressed up the next morning for synagogue, but rifts deepened. There were any number of people now to whom Yosef was not talking. After services, we went to our traditional First Day Rosh Hashonah lunch at the home of other close friends, along with our crew of well-dressed sourpusses. The kids descended to the basement for ping-pong, but Helen ran upstairs to report that Yosef was hiding from Fisseha and Fisseha was searching for him, expressing a desire to kill him. Such combative children.

Back home after lunch, hostilities worsened, with Yosef screaming in the backyard that Fisseha was throwing rocks at him.
[Read more…]

Let it never be said that I gloss over the ups and downs of Older Child Adoption.

Yosef, age 10 (who arrived in America last month) walks through the house with a loud fake cry. “Unh-hunh! Unh-hunh! Unh-hunh!” he sobs.

“What’s the matter?” I ask.

He shrugs, falls quiet. Then he starts up again, loudly, and as false as if he were yelling Boo-hoo! Boo-hoo!

“Yosef, WHAT?” I ask again. “Is something hurting you? Do you feel sick?”

He shakes his head no, and stops. Then he starts again.

After 24 hours of his boo-hooing from one end of the house to the other, I’m thinking: “He has deeply-buried grief. He misses Ethiopia. He’s in mourning for his late parents.”

After 48 hours, I’m thinking: “There is something seriously wrong with the child. He’s emotionally unbalanced.”

After three days, I’m saying aloud: “For the love of God, somebody make him stop.”
[Read more…]

A year ago, in November 2005, my daughter Molly Samuel, 24, accompanied me to Addis Ababa to visit the two foster homes of Mrs. Haregewoin Teferra.

A small silent boy of two, named Yohannes, attached himself to Molly.

An orphan of the HIV/AIDS pandemic devastating his country, Yohannes – like many small children – barely knew what he had lost. Under the supervision of kind caregivers, he had enough to eat, clothes to wear, a bed to sleep in. He moved from hour to hour obediently, asking nothing of anyone, not feeling himself especially loved, not missing it.

But Molly’s arrival in the compound triggered something in Yohannes; an inchoate memory perhaps; a longing. He put up his arms. He needed her to hold him. He needed her never to put him down.

[Read more…]

A late-night internet conversation between The Author in Atlanta and her daughter, Molly Samuel, in San Francisco:
____________________
Molly:
11/1/06 10:04 pm EST / 7:04 PST

SUBJ: check Powells bestsellers!!

You’re number three right now!
____________
MFG:
10:15 pm EST

WHAT????? REALLY???
____________________
MOLLY:
7:19 pm PST

SUBJ: selling better than Barack Obama

but behind richard dawkins
__________________________
MFG:
10:25 pm EST

I’m ahead of Monty Python!!!
This is fantastic news!
But it says it changes hourly.
I don’t want it to change. [Read more…]

2006-09-27
Politics & Prose Bookstore, Washington, D.C.

“Two people stopped by the desk on the way in,” says famous bookseller Carla Cohen in her warm-hearted and generous introduction, “to tell me that Melissa Fay Greene is their favorite author.”

She sits down, crosses her arms, and beams at me and at the audience as I get up to speak.

So I begin: “I’d like to thank my mother-in-law, Ruth Samuel and my brother-in-law, Bill Samuel, for telling Carla Cohen on the way in that I’m their favorite author.”

The audience includes, I later learn, a woman who knew my grandmother (Mary Pollock, 1890-1981) in Macon, Georgia in the 1950s and ’60s.

It includes a man whose late mother was a close friend of my late mother; their gravesites lie near one another in the Jewish cemetery in Dayton, Ohio.

It includes my friend Tema’s mother, sister, and brother-in-law; and my mother-in-law’s close friends; and my brother-in-law’s mother-in-law; and a close colleague of the man whose mother is buried near my mother.

It includes a woman named Judith who is the first-cousin of my friend in Atlanta named Judith, and a woman known to one of the Judiths, I forget which.

The woman who knew my grandmother in Macon, Georgia, in the 1950s and 60s doesn’t seem to have brought anyone.

The audience includes a man (he tells me after the event) whose wife’s cousin was necking in a convertible in the parking lot of The Temple in Atlanta on the night of October 23, 1958. Later that night, in one of the first salvos of the massive white resistance to desegregation, The Temple was bombed. In 1996, I published a book about it, called, predictably, THE TEMPLE BOMBING.

The man’s wife’s cousin never told her parents and never told the police that she had been necking in the parking lot a few hours before the clandestine visit by domestic terrorists. Now elderly, she had confided in these younger relatives only recently.

“He wasn’t Jewish?” I ask, “the man she was with?”

“No, he was Jewish all right,” says the wife, “but he was a lot older than she was and her parents wouldn’t have approved.”

Other than the mothers-in-law and the brothers-in-law and the relatives of friends and the friends of relatives and people who come from or have been to Ethiopia and people whose relatives were almost eye-witnesses to dramatic historic events about which I have written major works of nonfiction, there were also… there must have been… if I counted correctly…. somewhere, the two people who told Carla Cohen that I was their favorite author.

Our son Lee Samuel graduated from Druid Hills High School in Atlanta in December 2005; in February 2006, he flew to Addis Ababa as a volunteer for World Wide Orphans (WWO). His job was just to play with orphanage children, many of whom had just started receiving the life-saving anti-AIDS medications and who were feeling good for the first time in years.
A high school baseball player, who ran a neighborhood summer baseball clinic, Lee had envisioned organizing the children into baseball teams, into Ethiopia’s first Little League team! This proposal was met with stupefaction and whining on the part of the children who had never heard of baseball and didn’t want to play it. He organized “football” (soccer) teams instead, culminating in a little orphanage soccer league — with coaches, rosters, and schedules — which is still going.

Here’s his first letter home after a day with the children of AHOPE, an orphanage for HIV-positive children:

Hello there family. Yesterday, my orphanage had a field trip to what I guess is the only amusement park in the country. The 33 of us crammed into one van which is supposed to seat 8. The ride was long, incredibly hot, and a few of the kids began throwing up on the bus (including one of the four kids perched on my lap), but otherwise, it was incredibly fun. We discussed astronomy, European soccer, and the strengths and weaknesses of America’s and Ethiopia’s respective Olympic teams (“Why American runners get so tired after 10 seconds?”).

On the bus ride, the kids gave me a full tour of Addis Ababa: “There is bank!”, “There is goats!”, “There is dying man with no legs!” Also, the kids were always quick to point out every ferange to me (I can’t help but think that ferange really just means Crackah). “LEE!!! FERANGE!” they would yell. I think they wanted to assure me that I was not the only white person on the continent. In response, I would point at any random person on the street and yell, “KIDS!!! ABESHA (which means Ethiopian)!!!”. They didn’t think it was funny.

When we got to the amusement park, the kids ecstatically took off in every direction. There were swings, giant slides, a ferris wheel, and bumper cars. Unfortunately, the bumper cars had no electricity so I had to run around pushing the children’s’ cars into each other. I did this for about 30 minutes in 95 degree heat until I passed out from heat exhaustion. They didn’t care. They had a great time. Those turkeys. Later, they forced me to go down the giant slides with them, despite the fact that about half of them are deathly afraid of heights. I had to grab a child, place him/her in my lap, take off down the slide, sprint back up the slippery metal ramp, grab another kid, and repeat. I went down the slide at least 75 times, always with 2-3 kids. At American parks, they have attendants at the top of this type of attraction who tell the kids when to go. Not here. All of them would kind of just leap on to the slide at the same time and kind of tumble down in a heap. One girl got halfway down and then wailed for me to rescue her. I tried to climb down and get her, but i slipped and kicked her the rest of the way down. Then we had lunch. The food here is so delicious that I have gone through only a bottle and a half of Maximum Strength Pepto-Bismol in 8 days!

Lee

Dear Family:
Last night I slept at Haregewoin’s with all the kids. We played dodgeball all afternoon, had a dinner of injera and kikwat, and then stayed up until 5AM playing Go Fish and watching Arab television.

Thanks to dinners such as kikwat, I am quickly running out of my Maximum Strength Pepto-Bismol. In addition to quickly following every meal, it has sort of become a staple of my diet: A Coke and some Pepto actually make for a delicious lunch. My driver, Baby, is trying to convince me to try some of his favorite Ethiopian delicacy: raw meat. He tells me that it gives you tapeworm about 15% of the time, but me contracting intestinal parasites is a risk he is willing to take.

Speaking of raw meat, this morning I was witness to one of the most fantastic cultural clashes of all time. Around 11AM, while I was still playing at the orphanage, a group of about 30 blonde blue-eyed religious Christian Norwegians came to see the kids. They kind of stood on opposite sides of the compound staring at each other (believe it or not, Ethiopian orphans and Norwegian missionaries have little to chat about).

The Norwegians broke the ice by lecturing on how much Jesus loves each and every one of us. A woman said: “Jesus died on the cross not just for white people, but for you all too.” Anyway, back to how this story is related to raw meat. This week, a two-month fast (no meat, no dairy) begins in Ethiopia. For the big, pre-fast feast, the compound had two sheep delivered earlier in the morning and I was excited to have some new playmates. Sadly, halfway through the Norwegians’ rendition of “Jesus Loves You,” a man in the back began slaughtering the first sheep. Unfortunately, it took 4 or 5 hacks to fully kill it, so it was loudly squealing/moaning right in the middle of the Christian hymns. It kind of sounded like this: “Jesus loves you this I know. For the ERRRRRRGAAAACCCHHHHHHH . . . uhhh . . . bible tells me UMMMMMBLACCCCCHH . . . so.” It only got worse as the sheep’s blood began trickling down and puddling at the feet of the horrified Norwegians. They quickly said, “Thanks for having us,” and sprinted out of there while me while the kids jumped on me and all rolled around in the dirt/blood on the floor in hysterics. I have sheep blood in my hair now. I love Norway.

Love,
Lee

Dearest family,

I slept at Haregewoin’s again last week and I brought my laptop along this time. My grand plan was to show them the movie “The Sandlot” and then teach them baseball.

The point of all this is for the kids to learn a sport in which I can beat them handily. My already bottomed-out self esteem can’t take any more soccer game debacles.

Unfortunately, they didn’t really take to the baseball scenes in the movie, but they liked when Squints kisses the lifeguard and when all of the boys throw-up at the carnival after taking chewing tobacco.

When the movie ended, I asked if they wanted to learn baseball, but all they wanted to know was, “Why they no play football?”

Later, I let Hailegebrial write an e-mail to the man in Lyons, France who is in the process of adopting him. Here is an excerpt: “Thank you for sending me the CD player. The CD player is very nice. I like very much. I practice my French every day. Como Sa va? i am sad because of celebrate Christmas without you. But I am thinking of you always and it makes me happy. I like very much the charger for the CD player. It is very nice.”

The following morning, I took Pinl, Hailegabriel, Betti, Mekdes, and Daniel (five of the kids from Haregewoin’s) on a field trip to the super-rich (and thus very un-Ethiopian) American private school for a small carnival they were having. The place was so decidedly un-Ethiopian, in fact, that nobody there was able to communicate with the five Ethiopian children I had brought. There was also no food there that the kids could eat during the Ethiopian fast months (no meat, no dairy) except cotton candy. However, there was a dunking booth, a video game room, a movie room, and a dodge ball playing area. The kids instantly took to the dodge ball (which they learned from me) and beat the crap out of dozens of ambassadors’ kids. Seeing the Swedish ambassadors’ son knocked out by Daniel and then running off crying was one of the proudest moments of my life.

Later in the afternoon, I took Pinl (8-years-old) and Daniel (11-years-old) to one of the bathrooms on campus. This was instantly the most magical and fantastic place the boys had ever seen. First, they spent five minutes washing their hands in the miraculously hot water. Then, Pinl experimented with the box on the wall and discovered that it automatically dispensed soap when you put your hand under it. This was the greatest thing both Pinl and Daniel had ever seen. The two of them emptied two boxes getting so much soap, and then tried to run out the door to alert Hailegabrial of all of the fantastic things in the bathroom, but their hands were too slippery to open the door, so they had to run back and play with the hot water some more. Then they saw the urinals and asked me what they were. I told them that they were toilets, so Pinl quickly turned around and sat in one. I quickly showed him how it is meant to be used, but he didn’t approve, so he went into a stall. In there, the automatic flusher scared him and made him jump away. Meanwhile, Daniel discovered the automatic hand dryer and was heating up his whole body with it, even taking off his shirt and pants to better feel the warmth. After recovering from the shock of Auto-Flush, Pinl brightened up and joined Daniel, completely undressing under the hand dryer. Finally, they both successfully used the bathroom, but then walked out without washing or drying their hands.

From the toilet episode, I took the kids to the video game room which was too mind-blowing to even be comprehended. They sat there gaping at the screens for ten minutes before they mustered up enough courage to try to play. Daniel, Mekdes, and Pinl were very interested in the blood and gore of Mortal Combat, while Betti liked Lord of the Rings better. After a few fights with me doing most of the controlling, Daniel got the hang of Mortal Combat and began beating some white people. His strategy was to constantly walk his character forward and hit the triangle button over and over again, disabling his opponent from ever blocking or fighting back. He actually won a number of matches that way and made the Swedish ambassador’s son cry again. While we were in there, Betti wandered off and ended up getting dunked at the dunking booth, fully clothed. After coming back to me, she seemed completely shocked and hurt from the whole experience. Seeing how upset she was, Daniel walked over and grabbed her hand, talked to her in Amharic for a minute, and then led her away to the boys’ bathroom. I went in there after him and saw that he was showing her to undress and dry herself off under the automatic hand washer. Never again will I take our western bathrooms for granted.

Love,
Lee

Fisseha arrived in America in May. He has seemed to master English, and family life, incredibly fast; but this week we were reminded of the vast distance the boy has traveled, how profoundly displaced he is.

“Fisseha, come on! Seth’s waiting!” Lee called up the stairs from the front hall. Seth waited for them in the car in the driveway.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“To Willy’s Mexican Grill, for lunch. Fisseha, Seth’s waiting!” he yelled again.

“TODAY?” Fisseha suddenly cried from the upstairs landing.

“Uh… ye-e-es,” said Lee. “Right now.”

“NOW???”

“Yes.”

“And I… like THIS?” cried Fisseha, showing that he was wearing shorts, flip-flops, and a t-shirt.

“Yeah, that’s fine,” said Lee.

“Okay,” said Fisseha doubtfully, and off they went.

Later that day, I asked, “Fisseha, where did you THINK you were going with Seth and Lee?”

“Oh!” he said. “I think.. Lee say…Seth.. will marry.”

“You thought Seth was getting married?”

“Yes.”

(“Where did that come from? Is Seth serious about someone?” I asked the other kids. They shrugged.)

That night I realized that Fisseha had heard “Seth’s waiting” as “Seth’s wedding.” It was equally plausible to him that, given five minutes notice, he was about to attend his new oldest brother’s wedding, as that he was headed out for some burritos.