The Grand Opening of the newly built school
.

Thank you, God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough.
~ Garrison Keillor
.

It had not been easy going through the adoption process in Peru. At one point, it was revealed that perhaps Michael didn’t legally qualify to gain entrance to the US. I was being asked if I would consider relocating to Europe. A process that was supposed to take two weeks became a saga that lasted several months.

There were moments of despair. Not only was I lonely for home and my loved ones, but also I, who prided myself on my competence in my consulting business, was now experiencing incredible feelings of incompetence – in how to be a mom with tasks as basic as how to give Michael a bath. 

There were more hard times to come, but in the meantime, so much kindness came our way. The two following experiences took less than a minute each. Yet, each, in its own way, changed my life forever.

~~~~~~

Experience 1: One day I had to go to the bank. Getting there involved going down a flight of stairs with Michael in the stroller. As we bumped along a step at a time, a dapper and clearly successful Peruvian businessman hurried down the steps beside us. 

A few steps beyond us, he stopped. He turned and looked at us – dark Amazon Indian infant Michael and his blond middle-aged Anglo adoptive mom. In a country where race often defines relationships, he asked if he could help. He took hold of the bottom of the stroller and together we carried it and Michael down the remaining stairs.

When we got to the bottom of the stairs, I smiled at him and said, “Thank you.” He looked back at me with what I experienced as deep sincerity in his eyes and said, “No, thank you!” I felt breathless as my heart opened to receive his gratitude and understanding.

  ~~~~~~

Experience 2: There were new complications in our adoption process that delayed the possibility of us going home any time soon as my first Mother’s Day approached. I felt lonely and despairing with nothing to do but wait as both my savings and my consulting business evaporated. I sobbed as I tried to wash away my anxiety, fear, and self-pity.

A German entrepreneur was staying at the same small hotel as we were. He had taken a leave from his business in order to oversee the building of a school in one of the barrios on the edge of Lima. He knew the melancholy I felt. As the day of the school opening approached – which just happened to be Mother’s Day – Robert asked me whether Michael and I would like to attend.

We did. Even though I’ve seen such scenes many times before, I was amazed by the physical poverty in this neighborhood. The ‘streets’ were muddy. People were living in makeshift rattan huts without running water or electricity.

Cholera had recently arrived in Peru so the price of admission to the school – along with new clothes the school provided – was for the mothers to attend classes on cholera prevention in their spare circumstances. For example, all water had to be boiled. They had to go a distance to get water. And they had to find sources of wood to boil water. Just for starters.

As the school grand opening program began, Robert introduced us. One of the mothers got up and came over to me with a Mother’s Day gift! Here were these women who had so very few resources giving ME a gift! Imagine! So humbling. The gift was a covered butter dish. I have it to this day.

In that moment, I understood at a very deep level how completely and profoundly I also was living in poverty at that moment as well. The significant difference was that my form of poverty was emotional and spiritual rather than physical.

~~~~~~

Decades later I still get tears in my eyes when I remember the healing that occurred for me through the gifts of the businessman and the mothers. Such kindness and generosity! 

In both instances I was deeply humbled. I felt the power of love through kindness and connection that is available to us even when we do not ‘know’ each other personally. And I learned that, in fact, at a deeper level of the human experience, we most definitely do know each other!

Michael and his dolly

Photos by Barbara
Top: New school in a barrio outside Lima
Bottom: At ‘home’ in our room, Miraflores, Peru