Adoption

When we were dating and starting to feel that our relationship was heading towards marriage, we had a conversation about kids.  After all, it’s good to know before getting married if the other person has always wanted ten children!  We found out that we were both quite seriously interested in adoption, particularly international adoption.  We didn’t decide anything for certain that day, but wondered that if perhaps God was calling us to pursue adoption in our future.

We wanted to wait at least two years before having any children, so didn’t actively do much regarding adoption when we were first married.  Occasionally, though, we did some reading online about adoption and talked about it.  When it became apparent that the idea of us adopting was growing stronger in both of us and that we were increasingly feeling pulled to pursue it, we started doing some research in earnest.  We decided we’d like to try to have one biological child first, and then adopt our second, provided everything works out with the adoption process.

Since it’s likely that you have a few questions, we have a little FAQ section below.  If you have a question which is not answered in it, please feel free to e-mail us and ask!

What country will you be adopting from?

Because we are US citizens but live in Tanzania, our situation is a bit complicated.  Long story short, after some research, it quickly became apparent that adopting from Tanzania was our best option.  It would be extremely difficult and expensive to adopt from a country other than Tanzania while we are residents of Tanzania and, although there are fairly strict rules about non-Tanzanians adopting from Tanzania, we are some of the few who qualify.  There are certainly many orphans here in need of loving parents.  So, Tanzania it is!

Does adoption cost a lot?

Adoption, particularly international adoption, certainly can cost a lot.  The system in Tanzania is a bit different from countries which have a lot of children being adopted internationally, however.  Here in Tanzania there is no charge for the child and no payment to the government.  We do have to pay International Social Services at one point and will have a few legal costs to finalize the adoption.  We’ve been told by others who have been through the process that the final grand total will be about $2,500 US, which is probably less than what it would cost to have a biological child.

Will you get to choose if you adopt a boy or girl?

Yes!  In fact, we’ve already been required to choose!  On the very first little form we filled out to indicate we were interested in becoming approved as potential parents, we had to state which gender of child we wanted.  We wrote that we’d like a boy, since we both have only sisters, and Andrew really wants at least one son in our family.

How old will the child be when you adopt him?

On the form we filled out we said “less than two years.”  In Tanzania, in order for a child to be eligible for adoption, he/she must have an official certificate of abandonment, which requires six months of the police searching for the child’s family to get, so our hoped for “as young as possible” will probably turn out to be about nine or ten months old.

Where will you get the child?

We will be adopting a child out of an orphanage.  We’re not sure which orphanage, but the two that seem most likely both have good reputations and are a reasonable driving distance away.

How long does the process take and what is involved?

We’ve been told that it might be two to three years before everything is complete.  Adoption is typically a long process and government offices in Tanzania don’t have a reputation for speed.  At this point we’ve done some of the initial local steps.  After finishing paperwork here in Musoma, everything will be sent to the head commissioner in Dar es Salaam (big city on the other side of the country).  At that point, International Social Services will check on family references and things in the States.  The Dar commissioner is the one who will say if we’re approved as potential parents or not.  If we’re approved, we then foster the child for six months, at which point there will be more interviews, paperwork, and legal stuff.  Then the child will be officially ours!  After filing some forms with the US government, the child can become an American citizen the next time we’re in the States.  If this sounds like it will take a long time, you’re right!  But we know this - you will recall that we’d like this little boy to be our second child, and our first isn’t even born yet!

Are you concerned about the possible challenges of raising an adopted child?

We’re aware of what some of the potential difficulties might be.  Raising a child of any sort sounds like a big challenge to us, to be quite honest!  We’ve been encouraged by positive reports from families who have adopted children from East Africa.  Because we live in Tanzania and are adopting a Tanzanian child, we’ll be able to avoid some of the common problems with international adoption (not having a language in common, the child experiencing major climate change, etc.).  But we know the experience of raising an adopted child is bound to have its rough points and hope that you will join us in prayer as we embark on this adventure!

Pregnant!

We are very excited to announce that we are expecting a baby!  Little Sandeen is due on October 31, 2012.  We don’t know yet if we’re having a boy or girl, but hope to find out when we have an ultrasound in the States sometime after we get there in July.  The timing of the pregnancy seems perfect – we’re happy that we’ll be in North America for the third trimester, birth, and first two months of adjusting to being a family of three, so we can be close to good medical care and our families.

As you might have surmised, becoming parents will affect our work in Tanzania.  I (Michelle) really love my job and plan to continue working part-time.  My schedule will probably change a bit as the baby gets older, but in general I hope to be able to work some from home and go into the office to meet with the translators as needed, knowing I can’t be in the office full-time any more.  With that said, I know I can’t keep up the same workload as I have now, so have already started to make some adjustments.  Supervising and advising three translation teams would be too much for part-time work, so I have already started training a new advisor for the Ikoma translation team.  If I can’t be their advisor, I want to be sure I am leaving them in competent hands!  I will continue to work with the Ikizu and Zanaki teams, and hopefully this will be a doable arrangement.

We hope that you are excited along with us!  When I have enough of a bump to merit a picture, we’ll be sure to post one.  Please pray that Little Sandeen and I are both healthy and that there are no complications along the way.

Betsy, Feb. 26, 2007 - Apr. 28, 2012

Tiny and scared the day I brought her home at five weeks old

With her twin brother, Clive, as little kittens

Under the lemongrass bush in the front yard

Clive, lazy and happy as always, and Betsy, working hard to be a good sister, as always

Showing off her ability to flatten her hips and hyper-extend her arms

Adorable and having sweet dreams while slowly falling off the back of the couch

Getting her required solar charge

The last picture we have of her - enjoying her favorite spot being rubbed

Beautiful little Betsy died today, Saturday, April 28, and we will greatly miss her.  She very suddenly got very ill on Wednesday morning and never recovered.  We don't know what happened, but our best guess is that she ate a poisoned mouse while out hunting Tuesday evening.  The neighbors might have set out poison or traps for rodents and we know she caught and ate some critter Tuesday right before coming in that night. But really, we don't know and never will.  Instead of remembering her last few days of increasing weakness and seizures, we'll remember her life of five years before that.

I got her and her twin brother, Clive (who died six months ago), on April 4, 2007, just a month after I moved to Musoma.  Clive was the type who took all the attention he could, but Betsy was always quietly in the background, bathing herself and him regularly, hunting everything that moved - geckos, cockroaches, mice, snakes, birds, hedgehogs, bats - and being a faithful sister to her crazy brother.  Betsy, more frequently called Little B or Baby B, would patiently stalk a gecko for an hour as it skittered around up by the ceiling, and as soon as it dared to venture within her leaping range, she would launch herself straight up on the wall about five feet high and snag it.  If she saw a cockroach run under a cabinet, she would sit by that cabinet until it came back out again, and that was the end of that.  Also, she once rescued our neighbor Holly from a bat swooping around her house.  Our house has always been very clean, thanks to Betsy.

She had to have been the cleanest, silkiest cat in all of Tanzania.  She spent hours and hours every day bathing herself and Clive.  Her fur was gorgeous, as you can see in the pictures.  She had stripes on her face, legs, and tail, and spots on her sides and tiny tummy.  She sparkled with gold highlights in the sunshine, which she sought out whenever possible.  She was a total girly girl, clean as can be and adoring purses, bags, and shoes (sleeping on them, not using them!).  Never weighing over six pounds and usually checking in at five, despite being a relatively tall cat, Betsy was leggy, blonde, and thin as a model.  If she had been a human, she could have made a fortune off her looks.  And she would have loved actually getting to use her favorite accessories!

Betsy was rather selective when it came to people she liked, and only the chosen few guests even saw her, much less coaxed her to sit on their laps.  Since I had the privilege of being her favorite person, she'd let me scoop her up and hold her, and she loved to sit on my lap every evening while watching something or reading.  We'd call out to her, "TV time, Little B!" and she'd come trotting over to the couch for some love.  Her other favorite time of day was morning exercises with me.  Every weekday morning, after getting a little breakfast and a good morning scratch from Andrew, she and I would go in the bedroom and spread out my exercise mat.  While I stretched (and petted her) and/or did aerobics, she laid on the mat and kept me company the whole time.  She wasn't much for exercising herself (sleeping in the sunshine was her primary specialty in life), but she did a great job of encouraging me to limber up and work out, because she gave me a hard time if I ever skipped our routine or cut it short!

We loved you very much, Little B, and we'll miss you!  Whatever will we do now with all the critters in our house and yard?!

If you teach a man to fish... it shows you hate helping people

"If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime."

I first heard that saying years ago and I don't think I ever doubted it's worth as a concise saying that illustrates a great principle of how to effectively help others.  However, when teaching a session on "Money Matters" yesterday during the Mara Cluster National Orientation Program, one of the Tanzanian participants said, "If there is a hungry man and you teach him to fish instead of, or even in addition to giving him a fish, you are putting him down and being very rude.  A good Tanzanian would never do that unless they didn't like the person and wanted to make a point of it."

I was quite shocked!  The topic had come up because I had printed some foundational principles of how Africans in general view money as opposed to how westerners in general view money (taken from the excellent book, "African Friends and Money Matters" by David Moranz).  One of the principles in the African category was, "Space and material goods are readily shared, but knowledge and information are held tightly."  The reverse was true for the westerners: "Knowledge and information are readily shared, but space and material goods are held tightly."

I could easily see how westerners act according to the latter, but was a bit confused as to why Africans acted according to the former, so used my question as a discussion launching point.  Here are a few of the answers I got:

• "Few people can afford to get a good education, so if you have acquired some knowledge or skill that will enable you to provide for your family, you want to keep this know-how private, or else you will enable others to compete with you in the same business area."
• "If a friend is in need and comes to you for help, it's not because he doesn't know how to get money, but because he can't for some reason.  So if you start explaining to him ways of earning money, he'll think that you think he's totally stupid!  He knows how to fish, but couldn't fish that day and is hungry and just wants you to give him a fish, not give him a lecture on how to go catch his own."
• "I know a pastor who gave somebody in need some money, and also gave him money to start up a business for himself and explained how he shouldn't ever have to ask for money again if he stuck to these business principles, etc.  You know what, that man left thinking that the pastor was a very mean person who didn't like to help people and was just trying to get rid of the man so he'd never ask him for money again, no matter how much he needed it!"
• "Why wouldn't you just give somebody hungry some food?"

Wow!  This worldview really affects a lot of things - what is perceived as loving, helpful, and godly; what NGOs and missions with training programs are actually communicating to people; what happens when a curious newcomer starts asking a lot of questions about how someone is doing something in order to learn how to do it himself/herself (i.e. stealing that person's valuable knowledge).  It reflects how, in many African cultures, immediate needs are viewed as the most important and planning for the future isn't highly valued (after all, who really knows what the future holds?).  It reminds me of how much I still have to learn about life and worldview here!

National Orientation Program

For two weeks at the cluster office, we're halting (most) all usual work and having two weeks of training for all the translators (and the lone literacy worker, partnership officer, and head guard).  The training is called "National Orientation Program" and it's a very fun and valuable mix of exploring cross-cultural issues, biblical teaching, looking at different worldviews, team-building games (have YOU ever built a pyramid of plastic cups using four strings and a rubber band?!), understanding more about the SIL and Wycliffe organizations, and other related topics like funding and conflict resolution.

Yesterday I co-taught a session on "Why Language Development and Bible Translation in Uganda and Tanzania" (see picture above - and no, we did not intentionally dress alike!).  People have legitimate questions like, "These languages are just little local languages used at home; what practical value can come of bothering to learn to read and write in them?" and "Won't promoting local languages cause tribalism and disunity?" and "Aren't there bigger needs out there, like clean water and good health care, where this money could be better spent?"  My co-teacher Alison and I helped the group come up with responses to these sorts of questions and I think people not only learned a bit, but had an enjoyable time doing so.

Tomorrow I'm teaching again, this time all by myself, and the topic is "Money Matters".  Yikes!  Yes, most Tanzanians view money differently than folks from North America, Australia, and other such places do, and it'll be a challenge to present how and why both sides have these different opinions of what is "normal" and "right"!

Easter snapshots

This morning for Easter Sunday, we went to Kibubwa Mennonite Church.  It's a village church in the Zanaki language area.  We visited it once before, back in November when we took our two guests from the States (Bill and Dave) there.  We had such a good time that we wanted to return to spend our Easter there!  The choirs are great, the drumming even better, the teaching solid, and the people friendly.  It's about 50 minutes away from our house, so we can't go there every week, but we sure have enjoyed our two visits there! 

Today was special because we took along some Zanaki books to sell.  There is nothing quite as fun as literally putting mother-tongue Scripture in someone's hands for the first time!  It's not really okay to take a camera to church, but if we had taken ours along with us today, we would have taken some pictures.  Three of our favorite snapshots would have been of the following:

Picture #1:  During the announcement time in the service we told everyone that we had brought Zanaki Luke, Ruth, Jonah, and an evangelistic story tract to sell after the service.  When the closing prayer was said, a group of people immediately surrounded me (Michelle), and I only had one copy of each book with me to show as an example.  Andrew volunteered to go to our truck to get the other copies for me.  He unlocked it and pulled out the box, then turned to close it up and bring me the books, but he couldn't move!  He'd been swarmed!  Fifteen people were crowded around him so tightly, desperately eager to see the books, that he didn't even have space to shut the car door!  He came pretty close to selling out of books before he made it back to me.

Picture #2:  The church has two choirs, an adult/teenage choir and a little girls choir, which has seven girls ranging in age from about 10-13.  The choir girls were some of the first to approach me when the sales time began.  Being kids, of course they had no money to buy books, but they were eager to see them.  One girl politely requested to look at a book, even though she wasn't going to buy it.  I gave her the copy I had of Ruth, and much to my surprise, she started reading it aloud!  She took turns with two other girls reading it aloud, while the others listened.  When we'd sold most of the books we'd brought and were heading back into the church for sodas with the pastor before leaving, they were still reading.  We made a deal with the girls - if they promised to share the book among all seven choir members and to write a song in Zanaki based on Ruth and sing it at church next Sunday, we'd give them the book for free.  They burst into huge smiles, solemnly promised, shook our hands and ran away giggling with their copy of Ruth in their own language.  I think next week Kibubwa Mennonite Church is going to have some mother-tongue music for the first time!

Picture #3:  When we re-entered the church after the greetings and sales time, there was a woman sitting by herself on a pew reading her newly-purchased copy of Zanaki Luke.  We chatted with the pastor for a while, drank some Coca-cola, and after 20 or 30 minutes, said our good-byes and walked out to our truck to go home.  When we left the church, the woman was still sitting there reading, completely immersed in the book, her feet propped up on the bench in front of her, looking rather comfortable and like she just might stay there for a while longer.

Praise the Lord - He is risen!

Making yogurt

Milk (unpasteurized)

Powdered milk, yogurt (to use as starter)

"Cooking" for 8 hours

Voila!

I really like yogurt and miss good Yoplait, Yami, Tillamook, and Darigold products here in Tanzania.  Plain, vanilla, strawberry, lemon, huckleberry - pretty much all flavors are good.  When friends here started making their own yogurt from scratch, I imagined it would be a lot of work and didn't even bother asking about the process.  But when I found out it takes about 5 minutes of work and eight hours of nothing, well, I gave it a go!

I can buy milk in town fairly cheaply, so that is where my yogurt journey starts.  I take my own container to put it in, buy 1.5 liters, and then boil it when I'm ready to make the yogurt.  After bringing it to a boil, I let it simmer away for a few minutes, then turn off the stove and put a lit on the pot and let it sit a while.  When it's cool enough to dip my finger in it for five seconds, I pull the skin off the top (milk forms a nasty skin when heated, as anyone who has ever made pudding or cream of chicken soup knows), mix in a bit of powdered milk and some yogurt leftover from my last batch, whisk it all up, and put it in a stay-warm pot.  The leftover yogurt is necessary for the cultures it contains - you have to have bacteria to grow the next batch!  Then I wrap the pot up in towels to help it stay warm, look at the clock and check back with my yogurt in about eight hours.

I take the lid off, and there it is - yogurt!  At this point it is still a bit nasty looking, but I pour off the water whey to make it thicker, whisk it up, put it in a Tupperware, and after a few hours in the fridge, it looks like stuff you could get at a store.  Homemade yogurt, folks!

Genesis consultant check

This week and next the Ikizu and Zanaki translators and I (Misha) are involved in a consultant check of Genesis 17-36.  It's probably the most enjoyable consultant check in which I've ever been a part, thanks in large part to the knowledgeable and lively translation consultant who is running it, Enoch.  He is Ugandan, and so a good part of the fun is that his Swahili isn't so good (it makes me feel better about mine), but being a mother-tongue speaker of a language that is related to Ikizu and Zanaki, he's got a good advantage that most consultants don't in knowing cultural and linguistic things first-hand.

The other reason that this check is quite enjoyable is that Rukia (Ikizu translator) and Shem and Futakamba (Zanaki translators) are pretty great folks themselves.  They are now experienced enough after translating for several years that they are willing to argue (cheerfully) with each other, me, and the consultant if they feel that they have a different opinion about the best way to phrase something to make it clear and accurate.  There has been a lot of noise coming out of the office where we are meeting!  Five extroverts who feel the need to raise their voices over one another to make a point can get loud, and then the inevitable laughter at the end of every discussion carries well throughout the whole building, too.

For example... A friendly argument was ensuing between the Zanaki translators and Enoch about a certain verse.  Rukia was sitting there listening, but not involved.  The Zanaki were trying to convince Enoch that the way they had put something in the verse was natural language (it looked suspicious).  When a pause came about, Rukia quietly said something in a bit of a snooty tone to the Zanaki in Ikizu (they understand one another's languages), not wanting to make a big deal of it in front of the consultant, but wanting them to know that she had gotten it right in her translation and knew that they were wrong.  Enoch, however, also happened to understand enough Ikizu to know what she had said an immediately turned to the Zanaki and said, "Yes, just like what she has done!  Listen to Rukia!"  I think this was a bit of a wake-up call to the translators that they couldn't whisper in front of Enoch like they can in front of other consultants!