Children of Dreams, An Adoption Memoir Page 6

  “Yes,” they said. “We are on holiday.” They described Nepal as a popular tourist spot for Israelis. Having studied Hebrew, I felt like I had met some new friends.

  Upon arriving back at the Bleu, Ankit called about plans for the next day, “Don’t worry about food, we’ll stop and get something to eat.”

  That sounded good to me, or so I thought.

  Chapter Eleven

  …God has brought me laughter

  Genesis 21:6

  The next morning at 5:30 a.m. we were ready to go but Manisha and her father were not in the lobby. Ankit walked over and banged on their door to wake them up.

  Shortly thereafter we took off in the van. The trip seemed to go faster this time, maybe because we had made it two days earlier. We drove for several hours and finally stopped.

  “Let’s eat here,” Ankit said.

  The building was dirty and dilapidated. Someone was out front cooking on the ground in a large steamy pot.

  “The bathroom is downstairs,” I was told as we entered inside the restaurant. I found the stairs and cautiously walked down. There were farm animals and chickens all over the place. The aroma smelled like a well mixed concoction of manure and rice, with a little chicken seasoning thrown in. As I landed on the last step I looked straight ahead and realized there was no back to the building. If someone wasn’t paying attention, they would walk off and fall into the river below. I wondered if Nepalis had ever heard of building codes.

  I walked a few feet away from the stairs being careful not to step on any animals or something worse. There was a little room off to the right side. Is that the bathroom, I thought to myself? There was a bowl that appeared to contain water with chickens sitting all around it. Was that the toilet?

  Maybe I was supposed to hang off the back of the building and sort of squat and hope to hit the river below. I didn’t want to shoo the chickens away. I felt like asking, “Excuse me, chickens, could you please show me the bathroom or are you sitting on it? I don’t want to ask the guys upstairs because they think I am a soft American girl.”

  I got nowhere with that idea. I decided to go back upstairs and just keep this little situation to myself. Bushes were preferable to fighting with chickens over their toilet.

  By this time everybody had been served and was enjoying their meal. Whatever they were eating, it was very soupy. The “restaurant” was quite full and except for Ankit, everybody was eating with their hands. I looked at Manisha sitting with her father. They were also eating with their hands. I was totally disgusted and wondered if I would ever be able to westernize her.

  “I’ll just eat the rice and skip the other stuff,” I told the cook. A salad with ranch dressing would have been wonderful. I picked up my bottled water, which I had gotten used to carrying with me, and took a sip. I felt fortunate that the restaurant had napkins. Nepalis didn’t use napkins. When they were finished eating, they just wiped their hands on their clothes.

  As I spooned my rice out of the dirty bowl, the rats scurrying around provided a new form of entertainment. I wondered how my life could have gotten so turned upside down.

  Later in the day, as we continued on our journey, we stopped to take pictures of Mount Everest. What was it like to see the highest point on the face of the earth? I thought of Psalm 112:9, “He has scattered abroad His gifts to the poor…” It was difficult to pull myself away from admiring its grandeur, knowing I would probably never see it again.

  As I looked at its tall, jagged snow-covered tops, I couldn’t help but reflect on what precipice of danger might lay ahead of me. I felt like I was climbing my own Mount Everest. At least the mountain climbers and tourists brought in a measure of wealth and provided work for the Sherpas.

  It wasn’t long before we arrived at the CDO’s office. As we waited for our turn, Ankit walked off to do something and I was left to myself. An old, pleasant man walked in and when he saw me waiting, he asked, “You speak English?”

  “Yes, I do,” I said. “I am an American.”

  His eyes lit up and he waved his hands like he wanted to talk. He sat down beside me and started speaking in English. I had not met anyone in Nepal that spoke fluent English. He must have been in his 70’s or 80’s. To run into an old man in a remote region of Nepal who spoke almost perfect English—when half the population couldn’t read or write—I didn’t think that was possible.

  He had enlisted in the British army in Nepal during World War II. Over 200,000 Nepalese men served in Gurkha battalions and fought on every front with heroic valor. Over 25,000 died in the war.

  “I haven’t spoken English in over fifty years,” he told me. He cleared his throat, and once he got started, he didn’t want to stop. For one day, he felt young again, as he reminisced about his service in the British army and spoke in a language he had almost forgotten.

  I enjoyed listening to him. World War II had always piqued my interest and I love to hear people’s stories. Who would have thought I would spend an afternoon in the remotest regions of Nepal listening to an old soldier recount his days from World War II? We all have stories to tell. I was glad I got to hear his.

  Manisha and her father had stayed outside the building. They did not need to come into the CDO’s office this time since the Officer had previously met them. Eventually Ankit returned and my name was called.

  This time it was different. The CDO was excited to see us. He smiled and cordially invited us in. Today we were his guests and a male attendant brought us hot, spicy tea. I worried about the quality of the water, but wanting to follow proper etiquette, I took a sip. It was pretty tasty.

  He continued to pour over the rest of my papers. He laughed at a comment by my boss. She said in my work reference I was a very talented person. I believe he read every single word.

  At last he gathered up the papers and sent us downstairs to another area where we had to talk to someone else. The man rifled through the documents and seemed unable to find something.

  Suddenly he asked, “Where is your home study?”

  I had fortuitously made an extra copy and packed both along with my six sets of other documents. If I had not made the second copy, they would not have been able to seal the first one. It would have meant going back to Kathmandu to make one copy of the Home Study, requiring a third trip over the mountains to Janakpur. As much as I enjoyed the beauty, I didn’t want to make the trip a third time. Copy machines were a rare luxury here.

  “I have it here,” I told him. I quickly dug one copy out and handed it over. He took it and put it with all the other documents and sealed it.

  I later told Ankit, “Nobody told me that I had to have six copies. If it hadn’t been for the INS lady who Fed Ex’d it to me, I wouldn’t have had even one.”

  Mission accomplished, we headed back to Kathmandu. It was late when we arrived and we decided to let Manisha stay with her father one more night. All of us would have to make a trip the next afternoon to the U.S. Embassy and more forms would have to be filled out. Afterwards Raj would be free to leave Kathmandu and go back to his village if he chose.

  I felt conflicted as I thought about his departure. It made me happy to think Manisha would be all mine, but at the same time, it saddened me to think that she would never see her father again. I knew there would be tears of joy and tears of pain. How both could be true created a difficult and unsolvable paradox for me emotionally. When I reflected upon my own father leaving me at two years old and meeting him again when I turned thirty, I wondered, when that moment arrived for his departure, how I would feel.

  Chapter Twelve

  Let the little children come to me…

  Matthew 19:14

  The next day was Wednesday. Five days had passed since I had arrived in Kathmandu. We needed to return to the legal secretary’s office to pick up more paperwork. As I met the government official, his unexplained hostility toward me felt like “…flaming arrows of the evil one” (Ephesians 6:16). His signature was required on one piece of paper. I
t wasn’t like he had authority to not allow the adoption. He was sort of a “yes” man with ulterior motives.

  I gave him my paperwork and then was required to sit in his office for a couple of hours. I sat bored and hungry as the time dragged by. When I was a court reporter waiting on attorneys and judges during trial proceedings, I would usually buy a chocolate candy bar out of one of the vending machines in the hallway. How nice one would taste right now, I thought, as my stomach growled.

  “Do you have any candy around here,” I asked the man?

  He hunched down in his chair and looked at me with a stern look, “This is a very poor country.” I got the message, but it wasn’t my fault Nepal was poor and I was hungry. I was still an American living by American standards.

  “You need these things copied again,” he said.

  I doubted that what he said was true. I had my six copies of everything. He made me wait two hours to tell me he needed another copy of something? I took my documents and we headed out to find a Xerox store nearby.

  Manisha and I returned to his office an hour later.

  “You will have to come back on Friday. Things aren’t ready.”

  All he needed to do was sign the document, but there was nothing I could do. We left the Home Ministry office and headed back to the hotel. Later that afternoon, we also had to visit the U.S. Embassy so Raj could fill out his portion of the documents.

  Between filling out tedious documents and dealing with cranky bureaucrats, Manisha and I had time to get to know each other. Meal times were especially entertaining. I took her out for the first time to eat on Wednesday. The waiter brought us a Coke and a couple of straws. I sipped out of my mine and Manisha tried to sip out of hers. She had watched me use one and then spent the whole time in Nepal trying to imitate me. I gave her a fork and a spoon to use instead of her hands, but she found the utensils more fun to play with and still preferred eating with her hands.

  There were no high chairs or booster seats in the restaurants and sitting at a table to eat was a new thing. She thought it was fun to go up and down and move the chair around, much to the chagrin of people sitting around us. Once she fell backwards and I almost panicked. I had my first taste of motherly guilt.

  Manisha was fascinated with my long blonde hair and loved to stroke it. She was also interested in touching my face, which I presumed was an intimate way of getting to know me, and as she ran her hand over my facial features, I would name what they were—eyes, ears, nose, and mouth—as a game until she learned all the parts.

  Toilets were a continual source of entertainment. She loved to watch anything thrown in disappear. I had to be careful to monitor what she discarded. She loved to brush her teeth but didn’t know to spit the toothpaste back into the sink. Her spit would land on the floor. I had to teach her that trash gets put in the trash can, panties are worn underneath outerwear, little girls sleep in a nightgown, and I used Vaseline on my lips at night to keep them moist.

  I woke up one morning to find she had covered everything in Vaseline—my suitcase, my purse, the vanity beside my bed. I spent the next week uncovering various places where Vaseline had found its mark.

  The television in the waiting area of the hotel captivated Manisha from the moment she laid eyes on it. It didn’t matter that it was in black and white and boring. It was new to her and a big toy.

  As I reflect fourteen years later, I am amused at the little things she found so interesting and entertaining. Her world in the remote mountains of Nepal was so small compared to the world she was witnessing for the first time even before we left Kathmandu.

  Wednesday afternoon after lunch I took Manisha and her father out for a little shopping. Raj needed some new clothes and books for his school work. Most of the clothes I had brought Manisha from the States were too big, and she needed new shoes. This was one of those special moments I had waited for a long time.

  We found a store and the salesperson handed us a brand new pair of shoes and matching socks. Until now Manisha had never seen socks. When she realized the presents were for her, she quickly tossed the old shoes aside and eagerly put on the new ones. Her life was being transformed one step at a time. She walked out of the shoe store determinedly putting one foot in front of the other.

  “These are my new shoes my mommy bought me,” she told anyone that would listen. She stopped people on the street to tell them about her new shoes.

  I had much to learn from my little one, who had such an innocent trust in accepting what she couldn’t fully understand. She wanted the world to know she had new shoes and that was all that mattered.

  After we finished our shopping we headed back to the Bleu Hotel. I took some instant pictures with a Polaroid camera that I gave to Manisha’s father. The pictures I wanted to keep I took with my Nikon camera.

  There was sadness in my heart because Manisha’s father would be leaving. These moments in the hotel lobby marked the last ones Manisha would spend with him. Would God be sufficient as I would feel her pain, her anger, her tears, and her terror?

  The door was closing on the world she had known. She had to say good bye to her old life to receive her new one. She would have to grieve her loss, but a new inheritance in Christ awaited her. God wanted to give her something better—a chance to dream, to feel a mother’s love, and to know her heavenly Father.

  We took a few more pictures and her father said good bye before heading to his hotel room. Manisha was preoccupied with examining the pictures and didn’t notice that he had left. Unfortunately he came back out into the lobby. He thought he had forgotten something, but he hadn’t, and then proceeded back to his room.

  Manisha tried to follow after him. She ran down the hallway, but he shut the door before she got there. I was a few feet behind and caught up to her. She was crying and banging on the door calling for him in Nepali. I tried to pick her up, but she pulled away. I waited to see if her father opened the door one more time but he never did. Manisha cried hysterically.

  I was crying on the inside because I had so much love to give her but she couldn’t receive it. All she wanted was him. I picked her up and carried her up the four flights of stairs, her cries echoing down the stairway. I set her down on the bed and locked the door so she couldn’t leave.

  Digging around in my suitcase to find something to distract her with, I pulled out some Play Doh and rolled it around in my hand making various shapes. After several minutes she started paying more attention to that and less to the door. We sat together playing, not saying a word. Her big, brown eyes were captivated with the rolled snake shapes that I made into a necklace and bracelet. As she continued to be intrigued with the Play-Doh, I had some rice brought up to the room so we didn’t have to leave.

  Later in the evening I went in to shower before heading to bed. Manisha didn’t want to bathe or put her nightgown on so I let her be. When I came out of the shower, I saw a poor little girl who stood beside her bed with her head lying on the pillow fast asleep.

  Even though I knew I was in God’s will, it didn’t mean things would be easy. The hardest, most painful part of Manisha’s adoption was I couldn’t take away her loss. I had also suffered the same thirty six years earlier, but in His Word, God promised to take care of orphans and widows (Jas 1:27). I clung to that knowing someday God would receive the “weight of glory.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  …Am I My Brother’s Keeper

  Genesis 4:19

  Fortunately in life there can only be one first. The first night Manisha spent with me away from her father was the hardest. The next day was chalked full of things to do, including a check-up at the doctor’s, a T.B test, and an American Visa to allow Manisha to come to America. Ankit accompanied me on all of these errands because I had no idea where to go.

  In the afternoon after running errands, we would return to the Bleu for a few hours to give Manisha a short nap. It wasn’t so much I wanted her to nap as I wanted to rid her of those nasty nose and ear rings.


  For three days when she was fast asleep, beginning with the nose ring, I cut the string and yanked it out. I felt like a fisherman with a catch ensnared by a lure. Each time she woke up screaming knowing something had happened but not knowing what. By the fourth day she refused to take the nap, but the Hindu symbols were gone and she looked like an American girl.

  I had not found a decent place to eat so I decided to go upscale to the Mount Everest Hotel. I was still thinking about a salad with ranch dressing. The Mount Everest was a Five-Star Western Hotel and I was pleasantly surprised to find beef on the menu. I ordered my salad and got Manisha the biggest hamburger I had ever seen.

  We were seated in a lavishly decorated dining room and treated to superb service that made me feel important. I lamented how I wished I could afford to stay there. My fourth floor flat at the Bleu, with no air-conditioning in the hot, humid Nepali air, was a far cry from this place. I wasn’t sure if it was the beauty that made it so appealing or the familiarity with Western cuisine. By this time I was having pangs of homesickness and it looked like “home.”

  After eating we went to check out the swimming pool and I imagined how much fun it would be for the two of us. Manisha’s eyes bulged as she stared at the water. We would later return for a visit to the “bathtub” when we had more time.

  The next day on Friday, we needed to go back to the legal secretary’s office to pick up the signed paperwork. When we arrived, however, much to my chagrin, nothing had been done. The legal secretary was playing games with me. He kept telling me that I would not be able to adopt Manisha because there was a problem with my paperwork.

  However, when I refused to “buy” into his version of things, his demeanor abruptly changed.

  “Here is my phone, call me,” and the legal secretary put a small piece of paper in my hand and clasped my fingers over it. He either wanted money or sexual favors. I wasn’t sure which.