Why to adopt?

Many people ask me why are we going to adopt a child, some of them not in a very subtle and nice way, specially when they know that it’s a child from Ethiopia, or I must say, a black child.
We’re tired of so much stupidity, ignorance, selfishness, and also envy:
You can’t have children of your own? Why you don’t adopt from Argentina? A black kid?
And I don’t want to know the things they think but don’t tell…

Even though I don’t have to explain why to anybody because our reasons are only ours, I want to name some of the reasons that motivate a person to adopt.
Some people still think that the only reason to adopt is infertility, and they even see that like a flaw, an arrow pointing to the adoptive parents as if they were a failure, broken in some way and exposed to gossip or contempt.

Well, if you haven’t noticed yet, all of you who think that (especially in the reactionary Argentina), we are in the year 2008 and there are more important reasons than infertility to adopt a child.
To begin with, if we talk from an ecological point of view, it’s the best way to help to curve overpopulation that it is eroding this planet for EVERYBODY, married and single, with or without children, hetero or homosexuals. Differences aside, we could say that it’s a way of recycling. Sons and daughters without parents recycle themselves as sons and daughters of couples that at the same time recycle themselves as parents without the need to procreate more and increase the world population. A situation that helps the children, the parents and the planet.
Another reason, in the case of children that live in extreme poverty, exposed to hunger and sickness and probably to a premature death, the possibility to grow in a family that not only will give them food, education, medicine and a house, but more importantly love, what we humans need most and without which we can’t survive.
There are still more reasons and I suppose that everybody have their own but those two are very important to me.

I don’t need to pass my genes to anyone, I don’t care if he has mommy’s eyes or daddy’s nose or grandpa’s temperament, neither that his skin color is not like mine.
Just the opposite, for me it’s enriching, to embrace a different human being but at the same time just like me. To learn a new culture, another language, to see life through the eyes of a person that was born in another point of the planet. I not only want to show him and teach him what I know, but I want him to teach me, to renew me, to open the doors to another universe.
This is not a “fashion”, we are not Angelina and Brad (by the way, I don’t think they adopted for selfish reasons, anyway). This a huge commitment, for life. All our world is going to change from now on and it will never be the same, we are opening to the unknown; just in the same way as when you have a biological child we can’t predict what is going to happen and we accept what comes our way because we wanted it, we chose it and wished for it.
Our child or children are already waiting for us in Ethiopia in the same way that we are here waiting for them, they are already part of my family and part of my blood in the same way than Dylan, my biological son, is.
I don’t care where they come from, a child in need of a home is equal to another and what better place to adopt than Ethiopia, where there is so much need.
Also for those who don’t know, you can’t adopt from Argentina if you live abroad, even living there it can take many years. There are not so many generous countries like Ethiopia, which prefers to lose their children to other cultures instead of seeing them as starving orphans, something that very well Argentina could learn.

Sorry for the rant.

AliciA