People, not policies

Greg>
Yesterday was a very hard day for me. Several things occured throughout the day that left me with many questions and new ways of looking at things.

First, earlier in the day, I spent about a half an hour talking with a local shop owner. We have talked business with him several times, but this was the first time we were able to speak on a personal level. He and I compared lifestyles. As he asked about my family, he almost apologetically mentioned that he only had one child. He has a little two-year-old girl, but he mentioned that because he and his wife did not have a boy the first time, they can have another child when his daughter is six years old. Whatever the sex of their next child, they have to be done. If they had a boy the first time, they could not have any other children.

Later, in the evening, we had dinner with many of the other new families to join us on the island. They, of course, had their new children with them. As we ate dinner in a Chinese restaurant with a bunch of Americans all with larger families and surrounded by Chinese who could not have such families, I was overwhelmed by a sense of....what?....I still don't know. I tried processing it last night with Maren, but me the social worker, could not identify what was going on in my mind.

The best that I can identify as to what was going on yesterday is that I have now spent more than a week living among the Chinese. I have eaten where they eat. I have shopped where they shop. I have made a friend or two. I believe yesterday was the demarcation point of going from "adopting a child because of a governmental policy" to adopting a child, a person, that was born to someone very much like those I have gotten to know. I am not getting a boy from a hated nation, a poor nation, a lousy policy nation. I am leaving this country, made up of God's creations, with one of their own. When I fly away, I will be taking something from them. And I am left to wonder.