There is No Me Without You

I started this book the day we went to our Information Meeting at Gladney…way back in October. No, it does not usually take me eight months to read one book. This book is different. Every time I picked up this book I found myself only being able to make it a few pages before I was overwhelmed by all the obstacles the people of Africa have faced and continue to face. That being said, it is a wonderful book that filled me with hope. I know that once our adoption is complete we will not stop trying to help the people of Africa. They will become a part of our family; to whom we will always be indebted and devoted.

Never being one for book reports, I’m including a review of the book from signsoflifebooks.com.

There are 4 million orphans in Ethiopia today. 1.5 million of these are due to HIV/AIDS, the rest to famine, tuberculosis, hepatitis, and other maladies from which people rarely die in the west. With only 75 million inhabitants, Ethiopia simply does not have enough adults to care for these children. To make matters worse, out of 190+ independent countries in the world, Ethiopia is at or near the bottom of any list of economic indicators you care to choose.

A few years ago Haregewoin Tefarra was a happily married middle class woman in Addis Ababa. Then she lost her 54-year-old husband to a heart attack and shortly thereafter her adult daughter to AIDS. Shunned by many friends and family members due to the severe stigma carried by AIDS in Ethiopia, Haregewoin felt as if her life had ended. She applied to the local church to be a hermit and live in a shed in the graveyard, close to her dead daughter. A wise priest had a better idea. Would she take in an orphan girl? Why not, she reasoned, her life was over. It wouldn’t matter one way or the other. A few days later the priest brought her a teenaged boy with the same entreaty. I may as well let him stay, she thought, my life is over anyway. Since then over 400 orphans have passed through her doors. She has poured out her heart and they have given her back her life.

This is the story of one woman’s fight to save the children of her country. Without training, without government support or funding, without help from any human source, Haregewoin has tirelessly struggled to save a handful from life on the streets, prostitution, AIDS and death that surely awaited them otherwise. Here also are the stories of a few families who, like the author and her husband, have adopted some of these orphans into their homes in middle-class America.

Melissa Fay Greene is an award-winning journalist who has published several social-conciousness raising books and numerous articles in notable periodicals from the New York Times to Goodhouskeeping. She is passionate about her topic and so can be forgiven for her occasional leftist rants and simplistic solutions (big drug companies = bad, Bush administration = bad). We’ve all heard about the AIDS orphan tragedy in Africa, but its easy to think of it as “way off over there”. This book puts a human face on the problem and brings it home. You must read this book - but be prepared to be changed.