The same week I had my uterine fibroids removed in a comfortable, modern Berkeley hospital, our future daughter, Asmina, was born in a small hut in southern Ethiopia. The next week I was home, with painkillers and my loving husband, Thierry, helping me recover. The week after Asmina’s birth, her birth father died, probably of AIDS,leaving his wife with their new baby and two other daughters, ages 3 and 5. Suspecting she also had AIDS, Asmina’s birth mother refrained from breast-feeding, hoping to reduce the chance the HIV virus would infect her baby.
One month after my surgery, I was hiking in the Rocky Mountains with my sister, while half a world away, Asmina’s birth mother had died. Sadly, no one in the village realized she had been so ill.
The three orphaned girls needed a caregiver, so somebody sent for their mother’s sister. It took her several days to walk to the children’s village. While the aunt could feed the older sisters injera bread, made from teff, the local grain, she could not feed injera to the baby.
A neighbor alerted a local social worker affiliated with Wide Horizons For Children, our adoption agency, telling her there was a baby next door who was not going to survive without help. The social worker and Asmina’s grandmother brought Asmina to an orphanage in Addis Ababa. When she arrived there, Asmina, 3 months old, weighed only a bit more than six and one half pounds.
But the nannies, nurses and director of the orphanage were wonderful,and soon Asmina was growing rapidly. She endured a couple of trips to the hospital for bouts of bronchitis and pneumonia, but our tough little cookie weathered those storms as well.
During all of this, we were unaware of Asmina’s existence and knew nothing of what she was going through. But three weeks after she arrived at the orphanage we got a phone call from our adoption agency: We had a daughter! We received a pixilated photo and some very scanty medical information.
We thought about adoption for years before actually taking our first steps to adopt. Both Thierry and I traveled widely while growing up, and our four parents were born in four different countries, on three different continents, so it felt natural to think about expanding our own family’s horizons with an international adoption.
At first we thought of making our family a mix of biological and adopted children. But when we started trying to have our own biological child, we ran into problems. After some difficult times, we decided not to go through the effort and uncertainty of a high-tech approach to dealing with infertility. Instead, we agreed to use our energies and money to bring into our lives a child who was already born and needed loving parents.
Once Asmina arrived at the orphanage, her blood was examined twice for hepatitis B,syphilis and HIV. All the tests came back negative. But we were perplexed by the HIV test results. The test methods used, ELISA (enzymelinked immunosorbent assay) and RST (rapid spot test), both measure the level of anti-HIV antibodies in the blood. Because it was believed Asmina’s mother had died of AIDS, we expected positive results from the antibody-based HIV tests; Asmina should at least have received maternal antibodies against HIV, even though she herself could be free of the virus. We had serious questions: could the clinical laboratory have made errors in its HIV analyses, and by extension, the others? Read more page 6-9....
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