Interesting backgrounds and heritage

A year ago I had lunch with a friendly person I had met at a local church. Inevitably a question came up about our respective families. As an adoptive parent myself, I was interested to hear that her son and daughter-in-law have adopted a boy from Ethiopia. I believe they adopted him when he was around one year old. He now lives with his adoptive parents somewhere in London. I was interested to hear that this young couple have friends who have also adopted an Ethiopian child, from the same orphanage.

Image courtesy of Vlado at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The story then interested me further, because I learned that both sets of parents are learning the Ethiopian language. (Please forgive me if there are many Ethiopian languages. I didn’t ask that. Anyway these people are learning the language of the area their children came from. And they are studying this language somewhere in London.) This fact leads me to suppose that both sets of parents are interested in the origins of their child and doubtless they will be keen to provide the children with information about their heritage and original background, when they are old enough to understand and be interested themselves.

Our sons

Our first son’s birth parents came to London from Jamaica as teenagers. Since he was born in London, we didn’t particularly think of Jamaica. We took more interest in his position as a black Briton. Admittedly some of the picture books we bought for him came from the United States. The reason is that books featuring black characters were rare in England, and US authors such as Ezra Jack Keats had written such engaging stories.

We wanted Sam to see children who looked like himself in picture books and to feel great about himself

Jah, our second son, has an interesting mix in his original background – White English, Ghanaian/Nigerian, Dominican. (The records are a bit confused). His birth father came from Dominica in the West Indies. He lived with his birth father for over a year, so it made sense to us to mention Dominica to him. Since it has an interesting flag, we bought him one. This is the flag.

Image courtesy of creativedoxfoto at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Here is a picture of him with the flag one birthday.

Programmes like “Who Do You Think You Are?” are popular in Britain.  Many people discover that they have interesting backgrounds that they knew nothing about. I guess that for those of us who have adopted children, it is our duty to tell them what we know.

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