It was strange starting the Ango in a foreign city, in a very atypical activity; staying with your son in a orphanage. This however, helped to make the experience more powerful. If I have to choose one meaningful experience from these days, it would be without a doubt, it would be the nurturing seeds.
International adoption process is quite an strange process. You are traveling with four more families, which you barely knew from before and suddenly you are sharing with those complete strangers one of the most emotional experiences -meeting your son for the first time- in a strange country and in a very uncommon environment, an orphanage. So, it is normal that clashes between families arise. Some people are calmer, some are more nervous. One day your child is an angel, the next one is a log that only wants to sleep. Rapidly, selfish behaviors to protect your son at someone else’s son arise. Suddenly you see conspiracies, bad behavior from parents, your nerves start to crack as someone else’s child has been non-stop crying for hours… And then there come the nurturing seeds: when I felt angry towards that mother I instead start to remenber all the good things she did recently for my own son, or how hard is has to be for her to see her own child crying in anger, and I can no longer be angry with her, on the contrary I’m full of love and empathy and try to help her.
Nurturing seeds were also very helpful while dealing with bureaucrats; mistakes with the passports, problems with the plane… you name it. Thanks to the nurturing seeds practice instead of getting angry and yelling at them I start to feel empathy for them -yes you can feel empathy for bureaucrats at embassies! :)- and I think it actually help us to get things done. Probably, getting angry with them in the first place will only keep them in their stubborn attitude of “no, this can’t be done, you’ll have to wait at least a week”
Finally, I got a new dimension on what generosity means. The last day, some kids from the orphanage -those that due to age, disabilities or bureaucractic issues are more difficult to adopt and stay in the orphanage- join us and our children to play with. Our son was specially fond of a horse that make sounds when you push a button. A 5 years old girl from the orphanage was captivated by the horse and she keep playing with it for hours, putting in against her ear to hear the sounds better. My wife and I discussed briefly what to do, after all it was our son’s preferred toy so far, but then in an “act of generosity” we decided that the girl could keep the toy. To our surprise, when the kids were told to return to their rooms, the 5 years old girl came to us and handle the toy back. We were very impressed on how this girl, which had almost no toys decided to return it to us. We were very moved by this action.
Enough for now. Tonite I’ll post something about this day. In order to not turn this into a boring log on how much minutes did I meditate I plan to concentrate on one meaningful experience and describe it here.
Gassho
Da5id
