Africa

I have few close friends, but the ones that I do I'm very close with. I don't think I have just one best friend, I have several. And two of them happen to be in Africa right now. I just got to see one of them two weeks ago on a visit home and it was so good to be able to reach out and give her a hug rather than just sending an email now and then that she doesn't get to read unless she travels to the main city. I miss her, but she'll be home in a year.

My other friend who is in Africa will be home next year too. She's in a different country, living in the city there. She has an Internet connection, so I hear from her a lot more. She also posts on a blog. It makes my day when she posts and she shares her experiences. The culture there is so different than what we deal with here. She recently posted about attitudes about children on her blog and I wanted to link to it.

You can read her post here. I don't usually mix my personal life with my online adoption life, but in this case, I felt it was important enough.

I think that what struck me so much was the attitude that this mother had. Here, a mother would never give her child to a stranger and walk away. The mother wouldn't be so trusting. The culture is just different there. It makes sense with what I know about international adoption. I've read that a lot of African mothers think their children are being adopted to go to the US, get educated, and then come back. They don't think that it's a permanent thing, or realize that their child will never be encouraged to move back and rejoin their community. They won't know the language, they won't know the culture, and they won't feel like a part of their African family. They might go back to visit when they are older, or they might not. They might see going back to their original country a betrayal to their adoptive parents, or they might see it as essential to their core identity. Nobody knows. Attitudes are so different.

It's such a culture thing, and it really makes me think about the whole international adoption thing once again….