Day 36 ~ Generosity

Tomorrow we'll be going to a party hosted by a very special family. A couple willing to spend a month in the Ukraine seeking to adopt. They planned to pick up two children under five and came back with three siblings over that age. Their parents were drug addicts and grandma had been taking care of them for years until she needed some financial relief and placed them in an orphanage. She would pick them up for the holidays, hiding the fact that they no longer lived with her at home but not letting go of them. The problem is that by law, after two years in an orphanage, children must be offered up for adoption. Perhaps for that reason, someone tried to dissuade my friends from even meeting the children. They labeled them the worst kids in the orphanage, "All of them have issues, are you sure you want to meet them?" My brave friends decided to meet them anyway. An unkind procedure has children decide whether they want to be adopted by prospective couples with whom they have only spent thirty minutes. Fate would have someone forget about time, letting the happy soon-to-be family play for seven hours. Bliss. The children, ages 9, 7, and 5, had no doubts. "We love you, grandma, but we do want to be part of this nice adoptive family," the older one said at the resolution meeting the next day. The other two followed her older sister's decision. She's now 16 years old.