I've been humbled...

Two nights ago, I turned on my computer, sat with butterflies in my stomach, and waited to see the little icon turn green next to someone's name in my contacts list...when it did, my stomach lept right past my throat and into the ceiling above me. The I heard a little girl's voice impatiently pestering someone half-way around the world: "I want to see my mama, I want to see my baba, let me see them now."

The bravado quickly disappeared once she saw us. She was shy looking at us in the computer. We were getting short answers...which lengthened as the timer on the bottom of the screen clicked up with time. We got more eye contact, we got a few smiles, we saw her personality emerge in small glimpses - more towards her caretaker, but she was showing her true personality in fits and starts. Finally, giggles when baba swore up and down that yes, he likes the Chinese peppers too in food.

I was overwhelmed with the realization of the true depth of the language gap...she either didn't bother to listen to my feeble attempts at Mandarin, or found my tones so atrocious that she couldn't understand me. Truly in fear of the difference in societal norms for kids her age. She seemed so much younger than her age, she's smart, no doubt, but she's subservient in her thoughts, she did not feel at all comfortable in speaking her mind to us. She wanted to say whatever to please us, not realizing in this country that learning to be strong and sure of herself is a goal of parents.

I worry, she looked thinner, very very tired. She'd been in the SWI a month. And it looks like it is taking it's toll on her. I worry a lot.

And then I went to bed and laid there thinking about that hour...our first hour of life "together". And I thought about how she must have perceived the whole event...seeing the people who will come whisk her away, instantly to bigger, plusher hotels than she can imagine, onto planes she's only seen overhead, into a family that is completely foreign in more ways than one can imagine. The first time she heard us speak, in the language she will assimilate into, in the home she will inhabit, with all the mores and beliefs and history of "us" in this construct of a family she will join.

And there she had sat, worked up her guts and reached out to a new life waiting for her in clouded obscurity a world away. And she did all this sitting in a new place, a place that is foreign to her in the world she is used to...a place where she has recently had to work 24/7 to learn how to survive. Gone from what she has known for 4+ years...her family. She carried herself like a queen I believe, seeming small and fragile on the outside until you realized the strength carrying her thru to the point she's gotten to, and knowing that strength will continue to carry her thru farther than most of us could ever drive ourselves.