There Is No Me Without You by Greene Melissa Fay

Author:Greene, Melissa Fay [Greene, Melissa Fay]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2008-12-11T21:00:00+00:00

37

SUDDENLY, ON AN otherwise typical morning, help arrived.

A woman from the island of Malta phoned Haregewoin, introduced herself in English, and asked permission to visit. "Of course you are very welcome," Haregewoin replied nicely, so a spry olive-skinned woman in a long skirt, hiking boots, and a graying boy's haircut arrived, sat, and drank coffee. She smiled wrinkly smiles at the children all about her and cooed to them in a foreign tongue. Her fingernails were curled and discolored. She popped a few hard candies out of her skirt pocket and squeezed them into children's hands. Then she unbuckled her sagging briefcase and explained her business. She ran an adoption agency in Malta, she said, and she had a number of waiting couples interested in babies from Ethiopia. Did Haregewoin have orphaned babies here? Would she like to place them abroad? "We'd need to have them tested, of course," said the woman. "We can only place HIV-negative babies."

"How would we do this?" asked Haregewoin. "You don't just walk out of here with a baby . . . ?"

"I work with an orphanage run by a Maltese Franciscan order," said the woman. "The sisters there have permission from your government to assign babies for intercountry adoption. If you would like to give me one of your babies, we would take him to the sisters. We must confirm that the baby is truly an orphan."

The two ladies strolled into Haregewoin's bedroom and viewed babies in the slung-out postures of midmorning naps in circles of sunshine all over Haregewoin's bedspread. The babies stirred in sleep, throwing the weight of their wet, baggy bottoms from one side to another. "They're darling!" whispered the woman, pulling from her briefcase a copy of her license from the Ethiopian government and a small photo album of happy adoptive families.

This is very amazing news, Haregewoin thought. She asked, "The families treat them like their own?"

"Oh, my dear, please! Yes, like their very own children."

"They do not make servants of them?"

"Madame Haregewoin, they give the children their last names. They adopt them in court. These are their children. There are couples who cannot have children, you know? They have 'infertility.'"

"Yes, I know. Some have it here. But why don't they adopt children from their own country?"

"We have too few children! Don't ask me why! Women wait longer to get married, they have careers, they wait until they are thirty-five or forty to start their families, and for some it is too late."

"Here you are a grandmother at forty," said Haregewoin.

"We have somehow a shortage of children. The birthrates are falling all over Europe. School buildings are closing. With birth control and abortion, there are not so many babies born out of wedlock anymore. And then the young women keep their illegitimate babies. Those are the babies I once placed for adoption, but the stigma is much less now."

Standing at the east side of a continent bubbling up with children, Haregewoin found the image of an adult-heavy land alien and cold.

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