ADOPTED from Haiti

Si Gen TravayLoss is universal. So is betrayal. So is revenge. So is hope. So is love. And so is redemption.

Some of us in the diaspora experience a level of homelessness, even if we have a home Here and another There. We are aliens, some legal, some illegal; both now too foreign for either place. The hyphen between the words Haitian and that other nationality is more than a border-less bridge.  Those who left by choice use hope and excitement as guides. Those who were forced to leave are led by a host of other emotions. As the years slip away, voluntary immigrants learn the macabre anthem of the exiled. There is evidence of rot and mold on every fruit and slice of bread on ex-pats’ dining tables.

And then there’s that other story. The one you’ve always known, but not really. You’ve heard about children being adopted by foreigners, some legally. Others not quite so legally. It happens all the time. Another adoption will take place before you finish reading this story. Eyes at half-mast stare at the realities festering in our homeland. We don’t want to remember. Secretly, we wish the children well. We hope they are better off–in that other place–with grownups who selected them (for all the right reasons). We tell ourselves it’s really all fiction. This sort of thing does not happen in the civilized world. But it happens across the civilized world every day.

Adopted children have a particular way of growing up. Some accept the hard light cast on their personal truths. Some are grateful to the moms and dads who chose to love them as their very own.

Some run.

girl christening clothesBut when a girlchild feels in her blood that she does not belong where she is told she belongs, an intense hunger takes root. When she finds herself feeling like an alien in the only home she’d ever known—with parents whose physical characteristics she does not share at all—she asks difficult questions that yield difficult answers. When nothing matters but uncovering the absolute truth, however searing or elusive, she dives heart first into the unknown. Hope is now her guide. Fear, like a royal guard, stands close by–pretending to be idle.

Judith Craig Morency’s Adopted ID is the story of a woman reaching with tentative fingers into her secret and possibly horrifying past. Follow this link to the Voicesfromhaiti: Nou Bèl. Nou La! INNERview page, and read Morency’s own words in “Chapter One: The Return”

Sending you love and more of it,

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@katiadulysse

www.facebook.com/katia.d.ulysse

Remembering September 11, 2001

september-11What were you doing when American Airlines Flight Number Eleven flew into the North Tower, hurling unsuspecting victims into a death so certain and senseless that the world shivered with shock?

Were you having breakfast? Pancakes? Leftovers from the Chinese place around the corner? Were you arguing with a friend about a football game? The Giants? The Eagles? The Redskins? What were you wearing? Had you awaken with a sense that some strange thing would happen that day? I didn’t.

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