Last Year: The Day We Met

Jose held him first. I knew once I had him in my arms I wouldn’t want to let go. When we were finally together, there weren’t fireworks or tears, I just felt a sense of peace.

The three of us sat on the couch while Travis gave us our Ethiopia/parenting orientation. I handed Turo a baggie of goldfish crackers, which soon provided me with parenting lesson #1 – don’t give a toddler a large amount of any food. Travis tried to give us a sense of Turo's routine, cough medicine administration, the week's in -country schedule and eating habits.

But I was having a hard time paying attention, instead I was thinking "this is our son. We have a son. He's sitting right here. Oh, wait what did Travis just say about the medicine? Look how cute he is. Uh, oh, crackers are getting everywhere. What did Travis say about our driver? I hope Jose is listening. I can't believe this has actually happened." Then, what seemed much too quickly, Travis left. We had been entrusted to care for this little stranger, our child.

We were the first ones to arrive at the guest house, and I was happy that there were very few witnesses to our initial, bungling attempts at parenting. I kept wondering what the lovely women who worked at the Bejoe House thought of us. Turo quickly warmed up to these ladies, and they spoke kindly to him in Amharic. I was glad he had them and hoped they were providing some sense of familiarity for him.

For the rest of the afternoon, we played, we followed him around. I forgot all the Amharic words I had practiced on my daily commute. I spoke to Turo in complete English sentences as though he knew what I was saying. We fed him. We changed him. After a few hours of all this new stimulation, he fell asleep in the middle of our bed. We stared at him for awhile and tried to wrap our minds around what had just happened. We were now three.