Branching Points
Branching Points
I remember distinctly when I was in my 8th grade Social Studies class, our teacher invited a guest speaker to address the class. She was from the Peace Corp and spent 50 minutes talking to my class of jr. high students about her experiences serving the people somewhere in Africa. I don’t remember any details about the descriptions or her journeys, but I have a clear memory of how I felt while I listened to her. I can still feel how my heart was pumping so fast and how my body tensed up with excitement. I knew in that moment that I had discovered one of my deepest life dreams—to travel and live among other cultures and work and serve people who were less fortunate than me.
In high school I had an opportunity to live in Port-a-Prince Haiti for two separate summers. I worked with a team to build a medical clinic. I also served in two of Mother Theresa’s missionary homes. I spend several days in their home for the sick and dying. My job was to carry around a bottle of Vaseline lotion and massage the legs and feet of people who were dying from malaria and other diseases. My assignment was merely to provide comfort. I also spent days in the nun’s home for abandoned and malnourished babies. I moved from one cradle to the next, just holding tiny malnourished babies who needed human touch. And I worked one summer in a Haitian orphanage playing with and teaching the children. When I came home after my summers of service, I knew that it was my calling to adopt children.
During my college years, I met my husband and fell in love. Dale had similar intentions and callings in his life, but he didn’t see himself living overseas. I compromised that part of my dream, and I married the love of my life. Together we have traveled to different countries for short periods of time, but we never forged a life living permanently in a foreign place. We did however adopt our children—all three of our children we adopted from Burundi in Eastern Africa. Adopting my three children was a choice I made based on my experiences traveling and working among the poorest of the poor throughout high school and college. And the decision to adopt from Burundi was born out of a unique and unlikely friendship that formed between me and a Christian missionary from the UK, who lived and worked in Burundi, running an orphanage for victims of the genocide in that country. International adopting was a decision I always knew I would make, and it’s one that I have never regretted
But my adoption journey, more than any ‘branching point’, has shaped the course and the direction of my whole life . Any decision to bring a child into your life—whether through natural birth or adoption—comes with unexpected challenges and unforeseen branching points. Some children are born with disabilities or special needs; all have unique challenges that change the projectile of family life. Adoption comes with its own set of special challenges. And choosing to embrace a racially diverse family adds another special layer of challenges.
In choosing to become an adoptive parent of international children, I also accepted burdens that come from sources that are outside of my control. We have had to embrace our family’s history of war and trauma. We have had to embrace grief and heartache that reached into our family from sources that are foreign and unfamiliar to us. We have had to accept our own grief that sometimes tries to overwhelm us. Our children and their skin color has even impacted where we choose to live and work, and decisions we have to make about our futures. But we have also broadened our world in so many unexpected and beautiful ways. We have learned to embrace aspects of the Burundian culture. And we have become surrogate parents to many more Burundi orphans, beyond our own three adopted children. We’ve forged special and life-long relationships by sponsoring several to live in our home and attend college in Santa Barbara; we’ve hosted others for summer internships. Our lives have been enriched and widened in ways beyond what we ever imagined when we first gazed upon a polaroid picture of our three children back in 1995.