Josie

Thank you for your blog comments and emails. We read them often and praise the Lord for this connection with friends and family back home.

The first 24--36 hours with Josie has been....pick a word...Exhilarating. Bewildering. Joyous. Puzzling. "Indescribable" might be most suitable.

Here's a sound bite: Josie is beautiful and sweet. And she is confused and overwhelmed.

We'll share the long version next, but don't expect you to read it all. One purpose of this blog is to keep friends and family informed. Another is to preserve these early memories so we can reflect on them later. So that's what this long story is for:

I think the Lord gave me (Kent) a ten-second taste yesterday of what Josie is experiencing. We rode in a van with our translator and another adoptive family to the Civil Affairs office for an interview and to fill out more of the endless paperwork. We brought along some of the papers we needed but not all of them, so I had to take a cab back to the hotel by myself. The translator explained to the driver what I needed. He drove me along a route I tried to memorize, waited for me to run up to the 14th floor and take the papers out of the safe in our room, then he took me back. Because of construction and traffic he dropped me off a couple blocks from the Civil Affairs office. I had to wend my way through a sea of people, down what you and I would call an alley for about 500 yards, turn left, then locate the Civil Affairs building a little ways down on the right.

Simple, right?

Nope.

The landmarks I had tried to memorize were now blocked by new trucks and buses and throngs of different people, bikes, and police officers...The buildings were all enormous and the same shade of smog gray. Each was taller than any of the "skyscrapers" in downtown GR and they seemed to have been dropped there with no rhyme or reason. 35-50 story behemoths with only a clogged alley to access them, high rise old-looking apartments with power lines 7 feet off the ground and laundry hanging from bamboo scaffolding stacked as high as I could see. Every doorway in the alley was a flea market-like shop selling to the locals. One stall for copper wire, another for air compressors, a third for pulleys of all shapes and sizes...stall after stall of random stuff.

When I turned left the street was jammed with delivery vehicles and men unloading what looked like fruit and smelled like rotten fish. The workers gave me sideways glances that made it clear I didn't belong, and I had to press myself flat against a truck to let three bikes squeeze past that were loaded with more boxes than I can fit in our van back home.

I walked as far as I thought I needed to, then I stopped.

It didn't hit me until this morning that this was a glimpse of Josie's day: for a few seconds I was dizzyingly lost. I made a slow 360 and realized that not only did I not know where I was going, but I no longer knew where I was. Surrounded by people, I was totally alone. None of them looked like me. As far as I knew, none of them spoke my language. If I kept going forward or turned around and went back I would be hopelessly on my own. So there I stood. Paralyzed. I don't remember having time to be scared but I was certainly using all my faculties to try to notice anything familiar. Like Josie, my eyes were wide open and my brain was working overtime to pick out anything I could recognize. And as is the case for her, the thought of smiling or laughing at that time never crossed my mind.

The difference between Josie and me? I had the assurance of my heavenly Father protecting me. As I prayed and looked around, an obviously American man came out of a building just behind me to my left (left? I thought it was on the right?). I recognized something about the door he opened so I hustled over and asked, "Civil Affairs?" He gave me a most welcome smile and said that it was. Upon entering the enormous building I realized I had also failed to notice which floor my family was on when I left them. I turned around and caught up to my new dear friend and he said he thought it was the 8th. When I got on the elevator there were 37 floors to choose from...that would have taken a while to figure out! But my now beloved bosom buddy was right. The elevator doors opened on the 8th floor and there was Amy, with a look of relief on her face that must have mirrored mine.

Josie is craving that relief now as she cries sadly in the night. Everything and everyone around her is unrecognizable. We do not speak her language and she cannot tell us what she needs. She is suffering the paralysis of the hopelessly lost. My prayer for her as she cries out is that our heavenly Father will answer, and that He will use this obviously American man to help rescue her. I want Josie to be awash with that same relief and joy of finding her family. But I know it will take time.

You might be aware that Josie is classified as "special needs" because of a blood disorder called Alpha Thalassemia. We are not sure to what extent that is affecting her. She has been fairly listless since we met her, content to be held and snuggled and rocked, which quite frankly is OK with us. Although she is able to walk on her own she clings to us. We feed her like we would a wounded and frightened baby bird. But she can eat. That's promising. She'll eat anything and everything we put in front of her. Last night she showed some stubbornness, which is a good sign too. She was not going down without a fight into that OSHA-disapproved crib I turned upside down and wedged between our two beds so that when she crawls out of it again she will not fall to the floor. But crawl out of it she does, right on to Amy's chest where she sleeps fitfully.

The trouble with being adopted by a Science teacher and an Occupational Therapist is that your parents are constantly assessing your skin tone, gait, fine motor skills and facial expressions, or lack thereof. Maybe we should just give her a break and let her get used to this new normal. Soon enough she'll probably be running around and getting into everything...and we might miss these calm, quiet, clingy days. For now we empathize with her and mourn with her even as we rejoice over her and do our best to build a foundation of security for this little girl who feels so lost, though now she's found.