Open doors

This time last year, I only knew a couple of families who'd adopted kids from overseas. Adoption was a strange word and a foreign concept that happens 'out there'. Now it seems I keep in more constant contact with friends I've never met, adoptive families from all over the place. How this came about I have no idea, but this past week I've seen amazing fruit come of these distanced friendships.

Since meeting my little friend Gifty, I've had to wrestle through a lot of things I'd never dealt with before. For one, she's made me more paternal than I've ever felt, even when my nieces were tiny. And just as I was starting to feel really uncomfortably fatherly with this little tiny fragile ball of awesome in my arms, the doctor (a very sweet Spanish paediatrician named Elena) told me she's not going to make it. She needs a new liver, and that "just doesn't happen here."
I can tell you that any reservations I had about adoption as a partial solution to the global orphan crisis were summarily squished in that moment. I wanted her to be adopted almost as much as I wanted to adopt her myself.
While I never would have thought it possible, especially given Liberia's moratorium on adoptions, doors have been opening at every turn for little Gifty: a wonderful family has come forward that wants to give her a loving new home in the U.S., the Liberian government has said they'll do everything they can to speed her way, and with a few more doors opened (mostly at the U.S. embassy), she could be Home in time for Christmas. Then, of course, it's onto the transplant list and even if she makes a full recovery she's got a long road ahead.


For now, my hope for her has found friends in circumstances, coincidences, minor miracles. For now, she's getting a little bit fatter, a little bit feistier each day. For now, my hard little heart is a little softer for witnessing all this.