"Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved stnading beside her, he said to his mother, "Woman, here is your son." Then he said to the disciple, "here is your mother." And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home."
John 31:25-27
On Friday, the priest brought special attention to this part of the long Gospel story. She pointed out how, suffering and almost at the point of death, Jesus thought about the well-being of his loved ones. From that hour until the writer's present, the beloved disciple and Mary are together and a new support to each other. The priest continued that this is an example of making something wonderful out of dark and difficult times, and challenged us to create something meaningful of the Good Fridays of our lives. She gave a number of potential examples, including "bringing someone who has no family into your family."
Now, from the context, I think she was thinking more along the lines of inviting an elderly neighbor to Sunday dinner, but from my perspective it looks like a perfect description of our goal right now! For the first time, I felt kind of lifted up and energized by a Good Friday eulogy (because I don't think they're trying to be uplifting!). Had you ever thought of the Passion Gospels to include support for adoption?!
This description of adoption, probably because it is about adults, makes me think about the web of community. About how when we will take a child into our home, we are also taking into our hearts her mother, her family, her tribe, her community, her people, her race. To me, this feels like a beautiful and exciting thing. It is, perhaps, a little bit like a marriage or a deep friendship: how you care for someone, and by caring for them you meet more and more people who also care about them, and therefore gain a chance to learn about them and how those other people think, and some of these connections develop into relationships of their own, and gradually you change and adapt to each other in those places where your lives overlap. And all the while you love your spouse or your friend so much.
The widowed and heartbroken Mary needed the protection that her eldest son would have provided, as well as emotional support in her loss; I imagine that perhaps John had no mother or wife and Mary cooked his meals and listened to his stories, which gave him strength and inspiration in his new work. Our bonds and our love for each other are constantly growing and changing. Adoption does not feel like putting a blank child in a hole labeled "second child," but reaching out and connecting our web of love and relationships to a whole new web of love and relationships, swirling and centering on one little child.
Those thoughts make me feel all tingly and excited about our potential future as a family -- who knows what kind of future or how far distant or what it will look like, but that's part of the magic. But it also makes me start thinking about something darker.
It seems like a lot of concern in the world of prospective adoptive parents is about ownership. I hear that there are families who chose international adoption over domestic, because they don't want to have to have a relationship with the birth families and feel like they can avoid it by adopting internationally. Or who go ahead with an open adoption, but immediately try to close all the doors that they can, because they want to be the only parents and the only family. I admit that I haven't talked with any families like this, just read about it, but to me this seems like fear, and it seems like wanting full ownership of the child and her love.
I can't understand this at all. I mean, I can hear about it and try and figure it out and empathize, but I can't find it within my own heart anywhere. I think the part of the reason for that is that I don't feel like parents, myself included, ever own a child or the child's feelings or the child's love, even when they are tiny babies, whether or not they are biological children. By my proximity, I make myself the focal point in Emerson's life, and by my actions, I form our relationship and his attachment to me. What other love and relationships he forms are up to his own personality and needs and actions, and (obviously if they are not causing him actual harm or putting him in danger) are a blessing and support to him.
And even more importantly, no matter what other relationships he forms, none of those other loves affects or diminishes our relationship and love! Adoptive parents who fear that feelings about birth parents will take away from their own love are viewing love as a finite resource; from a perspective of scarcity. Love is not a pie. Children do not have a bucket of "love for parents" that is divvied up to all the different kinds of parents who are standing in line! Every single relationship forms its own whole, new, limitless wellspring of love and growth.
I can speak passionately about this even though I am not yet an adoptive parent, because I have been in this situation from many angles already. First of all, I'm a teacher who has loved many, many children. Was I somehow using up my child-love for not-yet-born Emerson when I cared for my students? The question seems ridiculous. As a teacher, I also knew students who learned deeper lessons from me, confided in me, received emotional comfort and support from me. Was I taking anything away from their love for their parents? Few parents would fear the love and support of teachers, but I do hear parents talking about wanting to fulfill all the roles in their child's life, believing the children don't need any other teachers or anyone outside the family.
I've also been on the other side. For instance, when my son was about a year and a half old, he suddenly fell in love with one of the other mothers in our playgroup. He had his own name for her, he wanted her to be the one to feed him snack -- when we were at parent/child swimclass, she always ended up with two toddlers in her arms while I stood there by myself! I could have been jealous that his exclusive love for me was ending, or try to make a big deal about being really fun so he'd splash back over to me. But did his love for her in any way take away from his love for me, even when his enthusiasm and his body were away from me? They did not. I was so happy that he had found the confidence to smile up at someone new, and that he had found such a kind person with whom to experiment with beyond-mama relationships.
When I was growing up, I had more parents than traditional; my love had to be "stretched out" three ways. When I remember back to my very littlest, I could not even understand why this was a problem. Two men called themselves my "daddy," but that didn't mean that I mixed them up in my heart. I could not have loved either father more if the other one hadn't been there, and each man himself created the relationship I had with him. I had three wellsprings of unconditional love and support, and too often the question seemed to be how I would divide them into two. We can only divide the finite; to contemplate how to apportion out the infinite is absurd.
I hope my children's lives will be full of people who love them: parents of all different kinds, and godparents and grandparents, and aunties and cousins of all descriptions, and teachers and friends passing by.
I embrace Jesus and John and Mary's view of love being ever-changing and growing, adoption as multi-faceted. I embrace Jesus' teaching that love is infinite, all-encompassing, and surpasses all our understanding. I open my heart and step forward.
Sunday, March 31, 2013
Friday, March 29, 2013
Good Friday contemplation
I just got home from the Good Friday service, where we read from the Gospel of John, the story from going into the garden to pray up until Jesus was laid in the tomb. Some things in the readings and the sermon fit in with what I have been thinking about today. Sometimes I think and think and think too much, and in this case I think that it is important to open my heart and share what I can. In this post I will discuss my first thought, and I will plan to continue with another example and contemplation from this story.
The priest discussed in her homily the difference between being a bystander and being a witness. We all know that in the crucifixion stories, like many of the most tragic stories in our collective and personal histories, too many people stood by and said nothing. John's gospel mentions three women (all Marys) who stayed near Jesus until the very end; who could not change his fate nor take away his physical pain, but who could and did stay with him. Their silent presence changed from the indifference of the crowds, who by not objecting allowed the death sentence to be lain upon him, into silence that supported and strengthened Jesus in his last hour. This scene always makes me think of Nazi Germany, where again the silence of the majority allowed great injustice... but again, a different kind of silence -- that of secret shielding -- allowed some hope to the persecuted.
The sermon shared this quotation from Elie Wiesel: "Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."
This is hard for me to write, because I don't have the answers, the conclusions, figured out yet. But tonight, I will not be silent about what this means in my life right now. I will have faith that discussion, as well as prayer, has some unseen power.
I have entered into international adoption not because I believe that this is the solution, because I believe that I am fixing something, but because I am willing to enter into the problem. That people are so poor, in food or money or human rights or health, that they are sending their children -- their hearts, their futures -- away from them, to uncertainty and to possibly be raised and spend the rest of their lives halfway around the world, is a problem so deep it is hard to even contemplate. Literally, physically, hard to think about because it is so painful. Adoption is not the solution, certainly not adoption by strangers in another country; adoption is a band-aid for the children who would be lost while we find a solution. And to me, by agreeing to take on a child who would have been lost, I am agreeing to search and work for a solution to her deeper problem.
I don't yet know exactly what my role will be in this. I am in the Lent of this part of my life; waiting and learning and praying. And more waiting. I imagine that my role will become more clear when I am in Uganda, or that perhaps I will gain some answers to learn where to look when I get home. Or perhaps, little children being needy (and I'm getting even more little children!), this waiting part will last a while yet.
But perhaps, by bearing witness to the little I have seen so far, I can be a Mary instead of a bystander in the crowd, wishing I were somewhere else.
So, when I examine the problem in Uganda of children being lost (to international adoption, disease, the streets, or death), I see the deeper problem as being support for women. I believe that women need education, training, and physical resources, because it is women who hold the families together and train the children.
*Some villages do not have access to clean water, or it is very distant. When children drink tainted water, their mothers spend too much of their time and energy nursing sick children, and community members who could assist are themselves sick or dead. When clean water is too far distant, the mothers (and the children who are old enough to provide material help) spend a large proportion of their day hauling water, having that much less energy to help themselves and their children with all their other genuine needs.
*Food is a similar problem, although slightly more complex. If you spend all your time trying to grow, process, or earn the food to feed your family, you are unable to attend to any other needs. (Food is still all the way at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy.) The complexity comes in because it is possible to spend all your time procuring food, and it is still not enough or not the right kind actually keep your family alive or healthy. Sometimes the parents leave their children while they look for a job to earn food, and never come back -- and their elderly parents have too many small children and still not enough food. Enough food is a huge, huge problem in Uganda.
*Education and training for girls and women would also save lives and save families. If this research is true, almost as many girls complete primary school (about half) and enter secondary school as boys, which is positive -- but the more education a girl has, the more likely as a woman she is to be able to support her family. It seems to me that training is equally as important: training in nutrition (e.g., recognizing that a bloated belly is a sign of malnutrition, not health, and what foods are necessary to help the child), training in sex ed (so women at least have some choice in family size, and how to protect themselves), training in how to save and use money (so they can make the best of the little they have).
*Women having ownership in a physical way to take care of their families -- nutritionally, financially -- could solve several of those problems and save many families. Programs that provide women with goats or gardening tools and skills address this in one way; programs which offer a market for crafts or micro-loans address it in another.
*Many children are lost to simple, treatable diseases; some children could have been saved if their mother had known where to go for medical care or how to prevent disease. Children are placed for adoption because their medical conditions are simple and treatable here (with health insurance!) and a death sentence at home. Mothers die in unsafe childbirth, leaving other children unsupported.
*Many parents are lost to AIDS, war, and untreatable diseases. When the father is lost, the mother has a much more difficult time taking care of her family by herself. When the mother or both parents are lost, usually other relatives step in to help, but there are limits to how many relatives an elderly grandparent can support.
*If women had a little more power in society it could save their families. There are children who are lost because a widowed mother must remarry, because she does not have the power to take care of herself or her children without the support of a man, but it turns out that her new husband will not take care of her children. There are women who are abused and cannot escape, victims of rape who are shunned because of their victimization.
Sadly, I am not doing anything physical to help these women and these families right now.
But I bear witness to children dying because of lack of access to safe water.
I bear witness to families broken apart because there is not enough for everyone to eat.
I bear witness to families who could have been saved if the parents had been able to qualify for a job.
I bear witness to children lost because their mothers did not have basic skills and knowledge, like when or how to go to a doctor, or how to use the resources they do have access to.
I bear witness to families who could have gained so much from a garden or a goat, but who had no chance to have one.
I bear witness to children who die of treatable diseases and children forever relinquished because of treatable diseases.
I bear witness to children who would not have been abused or abandoned if their mothers had had the power to protect them.
I bear witness to children left without parents because of AIDS, disease, and childbirth mortality.
I have been thinking about these things daily for months, from long before we decided to adopt. Every day, something reminds me of these women, these families, and they weigh on my heart. Tonight, I am not keeping my silent thoughts to myself.
The priest discussed in her homily the difference between being a bystander and being a witness. We all know that in the crucifixion stories, like many of the most tragic stories in our collective and personal histories, too many people stood by and said nothing. John's gospel mentions three women (all Marys) who stayed near Jesus until the very end; who could not change his fate nor take away his physical pain, but who could and did stay with him. Their silent presence changed from the indifference of the crowds, who by not objecting allowed the death sentence to be lain upon him, into silence that supported and strengthened Jesus in his last hour. This scene always makes me think of Nazi Germany, where again the silence of the majority allowed great injustice... but again, a different kind of silence -- that of secret shielding -- allowed some hope to the persecuted.
The sermon shared this quotation from Elie Wiesel: "Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."
This is hard for me to write, because I don't have the answers, the conclusions, figured out yet. But tonight, I will not be silent about what this means in my life right now. I will have faith that discussion, as well as prayer, has some unseen power.
I have entered into international adoption not because I believe that this is the solution, because I believe that I am fixing something, but because I am willing to enter into the problem. That people are so poor, in food or money or human rights or health, that they are sending their children -- their hearts, their futures -- away from them, to uncertainty and to possibly be raised and spend the rest of their lives halfway around the world, is a problem so deep it is hard to even contemplate. Literally, physically, hard to think about because it is so painful. Adoption is not the solution, certainly not adoption by strangers in another country; adoption is a band-aid for the children who would be lost while we find a solution. And to me, by agreeing to take on a child who would have been lost, I am agreeing to search and work for a solution to her deeper problem.
I don't yet know exactly what my role will be in this. I am in the Lent of this part of my life; waiting and learning and praying. And more waiting. I imagine that my role will become more clear when I am in Uganda, or that perhaps I will gain some answers to learn where to look when I get home. Or perhaps, little children being needy (and I'm getting even more little children!), this waiting part will last a while yet.
But perhaps, by bearing witness to the little I have seen so far, I can be a Mary instead of a bystander in the crowd, wishing I were somewhere else.
So, when I examine the problem in Uganda of children being lost (to international adoption, disease, the streets, or death), I see the deeper problem as being support for women. I believe that women need education, training, and physical resources, because it is women who hold the families together and train the children.
*Some villages do not have access to clean water, or it is very distant. When children drink tainted water, their mothers spend too much of their time and energy nursing sick children, and community members who could assist are themselves sick or dead. When clean water is too far distant, the mothers (and the children who are old enough to provide material help) spend a large proportion of their day hauling water, having that much less energy to help themselves and their children with all their other genuine needs.
*Food is a similar problem, although slightly more complex. If you spend all your time trying to grow, process, or earn the food to feed your family, you are unable to attend to any other needs. (Food is still all the way at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy.) The complexity comes in because it is possible to spend all your time procuring food, and it is still not enough or not the right kind actually keep your family alive or healthy. Sometimes the parents leave their children while they look for a job to earn food, and never come back -- and their elderly parents have too many small children and still not enough food. Enough food is a huge, huge problem in Uganda.
*Education and training for girls and women would also save lives and save families. If this research is true, almost as many girls complete primary school (about half) and enter secondary school as boys, which is positive -- but the more education a girl has, the more likely as a woman she is to be able to support her family. It seems to me that training is equally as important: training in nutrition (e.g., recognizing that a bloated belly is a sign of malnutrition, not health, and what foods are necessary to help the child), training in sex ed (so women at least have some choice in family size, and how to protect themselves), training in how to save and use money (so they can make the best of the little they have).
*Women having ownership in a physical way to take care of their families -- nutritionally, financially -- could solve several of those problems and save many families. Programs that provide women with goats or gardening tools and skills address this in one way; programs which offer a market for crafts or micro-loans address it in another.
*Many children are lost to simple, treatable diseases; some children could have been saved if their mother had known where to go for medical care or how to prevent disease. Children are placed for adoption because their medical conditions are simple and treatable here (with health insurance!) and a death sentence at home. Mothers die in unsafe childbirth, leaving other children unsupported.
*Many parents are lost to AIDS, war, and untreatable diseases. When the father is lost, the mother has a much more difficult time taking care of her family by herself. When the mother or both parents are lost, usually other relatives step in to help, but there are limits to how many relatives an elderly grandparent can support.
*If women had a little more power in society it could save their families. There are children who are lost because a widowed mother must remarry, because she does not have the power to take care of herself or her children without the support of a man, but it turns out that her new husband will not take care of her children. There are women who are abused and cannot escape, victims of rape who are shunned because of their victimization.
Sadly, I am not doing anything physical to help these women and these families right now.
But I bear witness to children dying because of lack of access to safe water.
I bear witness to families broken apart because there is not enough for everyone to eat.
I bear witness to families who could have been saved if the parents had been able to qualify for a job.
I bear witness to children lost because their mothers did not have basic skills and knowledge, like when or how to go to a doctor, or how to use the resources they do have access to.
I bear witness to families who could have gained so much from a garden or a goat, but who had no chance to have one.
I bear witness to children who die of treatable diseases and children forever relinquished because of treatable diseases.
I bear witness to children who would not have been abused or abandoned if their mothers had had the power to protect them.
I bear witness to children left without parents because of AIDS, disease, and childbirth mortality.
I have been thinking about these things daily for months, from long before we decided to adopt. Every day, something reminds me of these women, these families, and they weigh on my heart. Tonight, I am not keeping my silent thoughts to myself.
Monday, March 25, 2013
Moving on
Rehema has returned to living with her mother. We are still at home in Eugene. Our journey to bring our family together is back to the stages of mystery and waiting, which has been emotional, but things could have been much worse.
When I last wrote, we were not sure what would happen to Rehema. The following day in Uganda, both birth parents rescinded their support for the adoption, and the same day the orphanage workers returned Rehema to her mother in her village. The social worker in charge of the village was alerted to the situation and would keep an eye out for the child, and we were to be told if anything new developed. At this point, we have heard nothing, and no news is fairly good news, meaning that Rehema's mother is now taking care of her and she has not needed to relinquish her again. I am choosing to assume that something changed in the family situation -- perhaps the extended family became willing to help the mother care for the child, or simply that the disabled mother was able to care for a healthy, walking toddler in a way she was not able to do for an infant.
The best place for a child is with her own family, in her own culture. Rehema is blessed that she is able to return to the place where she was born and first loved. I continue to pray for her and her mother every day, that she has love and enough to eat. For her, the year away from her family in the orphanage must be a confusing change, but perhaps that time gave her physical strength or her extended family a different perspective in a way that will improve the rest of her life. Or perhaps we became connected in this distant way, and Rehema is held up by prayers in a way she wouldn't have been otherwise.
We want to adopt a child who has no other options for life and growth. At this point, Rehema clearly has other options -- living with her mother, or possibly even her father's relatives who took an interest in her. Her place is not in our family, and we still have room in our home and our hearts for a child who is all out of options.
*Could the situation have turned out differently? Is there something the agency did wrong or could have done better?*
Of course, we will never know the answer to the first question. It is a mystery to us why the family was supportive of her being in the orphanage for an entire year and then changed their minds; it could be that some outside event that we will never know about changed the situation. Could the agency have been more proactive about staying in touch with the family or doing some of the paperwork earlier, and would that have made a difference? We won't ever really know that, either; in fact, they might have been in contact with the family on a regular basis (we do know workers were in the village several times). However, if something did change that now the mother wants to and can take care of her daughter, I'm glad that she had the chance to make that decision and she wasn't locked into a relinquishment that she later regretted. Perhaps it could have gone a little more smoothly for all of us -- including Rehema -- if they had been working on the case and found out a few weeks earlier, but again, we don't know exactly what happened and if there were extenuating circumstances at exactly that time. At any rate, it would have only been a few weeks' difference, since they couldn't start until they had our paperwork in hand.
I think that it is positive that the orphanage returned the girl to her home as soon as they heard that she was wanted there, and did not put pressure on the mother to place her child for adoption after all. That should be the parents' decision, and it is not our business or the agency's business why they change their minds; there is a local social worker, who presumably is looking out for the needs of the mother and children. Bigger questions of whether the mother was receiving negative pressure from her relatives or the rest of the village, need to be addressed in a grander format.... such as making sure that girls and women have access to education, and the ability to earn and save money to take care of themselves.
I also think that it is positive that the agency contacted us immediately to let us know what was going on, and continued to be open and honest about the difficulties as well as the successes that they are having. The good news is that there are children from the orphanage coming home to American families -- and far more cases are proceeding smoothly than having upsets like ours. From what I can tell, they are taking the difficulties seriously and being proactive about addressing them. The director of the agency here in Oregon is in Uganda right now, trying to figure out exactly what the situation is and what the next steps should be. It seems like many of the problems stem from the difficulty in communication and cultural expectations, and hopefully he will be able to clarify some of those issues in person.
*Is this situation unfair or unreasonable for us?*
It has been emotionally harrowing, but I don't think it is out of the range of normal. We knew going into this that Uganda's adoption program has a lot of variation in it, and that the placement is not guaranteed until the court date. This is not a long-established Hague country with a specific procedure that always happens. We also knew that this agency had a brand-new program, that the director in-country was well-meaning but not experienced with international adoption. These are the risks that we took and that we knew about going into the program, and the reasons that we chose this country and the program are still valid, and worthwhile despite the risks. It is sad for us that we became emotionally attached to a placement that fell through, but we knew that it was a possibility.
And now we all keep going. Our family is waiting for a new match -- with a child who truly has no other options for life and growth. Rehema and her mother and getting to know each other again and moving forward with their lives. The agency and orphanage workers are still trying to help children who have no safety net in a way that is honest and ethical. There are still many women and children in Uganda who don't have clean drinking water or access to education or medical care, and hopefully through the years we will be able to do some small part to support other families, so that other children will have more options in their own beautiful country.
When I last wrote, we were not sure what would happen to Rehema. The following day in Uganda, both birth parents rescinded their support for the adoption, and the same day the orphanage workers returned Rehema to her mother in her village. The social worker in charge of the village was alerted to the situation and would keep an eye out for the child, and we were to be told if anything new developed. At this point, we have heard nothing, and no news is fairly good news, meaning that Rehema's mother is now taking care of her and she has not needed to relinquish her again. I am choosing to assume that something changed in the family situation -- perhaps the extended family became willing to help the mother care for the child, or simply that the disabled mother was able to care for a healthy, walking toddler in a way she was not able to do for an infant.
The best place for a child is with her own family, in her own culture. Rehema is blessed that she is able to return to the place where she was born and first loved. I continue to pray for her and her mother every day, that she has love and enough to eat. For her, the year away from her family in the orphanage must be a confusing change, but perhaps that time gave her physical strength or her extended family a different perspective in a way that will improve the rest of her life. Or perhaps we became connected in this distant way, and Rehema is held up by prayers in a way she wouldn't have been otherwise.
We want to adopt a child who has no other options for life and growth. At this point, Rehema clearly has other options -- living with her mother, or possibly even her father's relatives who took an interest in her. Her place is not in our family, and we still have room in our home and our hearts for a child who is all out of options.
*Could the situation have turned out differently? Is there something the agency did wrong or could have done better?*
Of course, we will never know the answer to the first question. It is a mystery to us why the family was supportive of her being in the orphanage for an entire year and then changed their minds; it could be that some outside event that we will never know about changed the situation. Could the agency have been more proactive about staying in touch with the family or doing some of the paperwork earlier, and would that have made a difference? We won't ever really know that, either; in fact, they might have been in contact with the family on a regular basis (we do know workers were in the village several times). However, if something did change that now the mother wants to and can take care of her daughter, I'm glad that she had the chance to make that decision and she wasn't locked into a relinquishment that she later regretted. Perhaps it could have gone a little more smoothly for all of us -- including Rehema -- if they had been working on the case and found out a few weeks earlier, but again, we don't know exactly what happened and if there were extenuating circumstances at exactly that time. At any rate, it would have only been a few weeks' difference, since they couldn't start until they had our paperwork in hand.
I think that it is positive that the orphanage returned the girl to her home as soon as they heard that she was wanted there, and did not put pressure on the mother to place her child for adoption after all. That should be the parents' decision, and it is not our business or the agency's business why they change their minds; there is a local social worker, who presumably is looking out for the needs of the mother and children. Bigger questions of whether the mother was receiving negative pressure from her relatives or the rest of the village, need to be addressed in a grander format.... such as making sure that girls and women have access to education, and the ability to earn and save money to take care of themselves.
I also think that it is positive that the agency contacted us immediately to let us know what was going on, and continued to be open and honest about the difficulties as well as the successes that they are having. The good news is that there are children from the orphanage coming home to American families -- and far more cases are proceeding smoothly than having upsets like ours. From what I can tell, they are taking the difficulties seriously and being proactive about addressing them. The director of the agency here in Oregon is in Uganda right now, trying to figure out exactly what the situation is and what the next steps should be. It seems like many of the problems stem from the difficulty in communication and cultural expectations, and hopefully he will be able to clarify some of those issues in person.
*Is this situation unfair or unreasonable for us?*
It has been emotionally harrowing, but I don't think it is out of the range of normal. We knew going into this that Uganda's adoption program has a lot of variation in it, and that the placement is not guaranteed until the court date. This is not a long-established Hague country with a specific procedure that always happens. We also knew that this agency had a brand-new program, that the director in-country was well-meaning but not experienced with international adoption. These are the risks that we took and that we knew about going into the program, and the reasons that we chose this country and the program are still valid, and worthwhile despite the risks. It is sad for us that we became emotionally attached to a placement that fell through, but we knew that it was a possibility.
And now we all keep going. Our family is waiting for a new match -- with a child who truly has no other options for life and growth. Rehema and her mother and getting to know each other again and moving forward with their lives. The agency and orphanage workers are still trying to help children who have no safety net in a way that is honest and ethical. There are still many women and children in Uganda who don't have clean drinking water or access to education or medical care, and hopefully through the years we will be able to do some small part to support other families, so that other children will have more options in their own beautiful country.
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