After two days staying at the Ghion Hotel in Addis Ababa and taking trips over to the orphanage to visit Maia, our newly adopted daughter, we went on an overnight trip down to Awassa to visit her birth family.

Maia is an orphan. We knew she had a surviving maternal aunt and two uncles, but we didn’t know whom we’d meet.

We traveled with a lovely young couple from Seattle, Stacey and Eric, who were adopting two sisters, Abebech and Adenech. Our driver was Solomon.

We left early on the Saturday morning, heading off not long after dawn, stopping once on the outskirts of Addis to pick up a few supplies for the road, and a few hours later to use the bathrooms at a roadside cafe.

The road to Awassa is long and straight, and it runs through scrubby savanna with flat-topped trees and compounds of circular grass huts. Everywhere along the road there were people walking, or standing waiting for buses, or driving donkeys carrying improbably large loads. Children waved and shouted, often asking for pens, which they need for school.

Stacey and Eric’s birth family visit was first. We met their daughters’ uncle and five older siblings in a brightly painted house in a village about 30 minutes south of Awassa. Shrijnana and I took pictures while our translator read a letter that Stacey and Eric had written to the family. The children seemed rather sad, except when they saw some Polaroid photographs of themselves. I doubted that the younger ones had ever seen themselves in photographs. On the whole the meeting went well. The uncle seemed relieved and glad that the two youngest girls would have a better chance in life.

We were told that our birth family visit would be back in Awassa, and so I imagined it would be in a house or apartment in the town, but it turned out that we visited a grass hut on outskirts of the city.

We met an elderly couple who we took to be a great aunt and uncle, although the relationship wasn’t clear, but the person who we were really there to meet — Maia’s aunt M. — wasn’t there when we arrived. The hut was bare, apart from a few cooking utensils, a dung fire, a small wooden stool, and a bench that had no doubt been brought in specially for the occasion.

M. arrived, looking much younger than I had anticipated. The paperwork we had said that she was 26, but she looked more like she was 19. She was small, and had a teenager’s shy awkwardness. I wondered if she’d ever met white people before, and thought that we must be very intimidating. I had the feeling she was ashamed of her poverty.

M. was obviously very sad that she’d not been able to take care of her sister’s daughter. It appeared that she’d tried to take care of her for at least a month before deciding that the best thing she could do was take Maia to an orphanage.

M. was so sad it was hard to ask her questions. We learned that Maia had been born in that very hut. Among the few personal details we learned about Maia’s birth parents were that they were “tall.” Ethiopians are generally small by western standards, and the family seemed short compared to other Ethiopians, so we don’t know what “tall” means.

We gave M. a book of photographs showing our families, our house, and the town we live in, with a special emphasis on the schools Maia would attend. This was all we could give her because the adoption agency has to avoid any appearance that children are being traded for money or possessions. Even though Ethiopians dearly cherish their children, in a country as impoverished as Ethiopia such an impression could result in children being given up in large numbers in the expectation of payment.

It was deeply upsetting to see the poverty in which M. and others lived, and to know that we couldn’t do anything directly to help. She’s family, and she has nothing. It was also upsetting that a family had to be split up because of poverty, and yet we in the west have so much wealth. I found myself thinking that adoption is not the solution — really families need to have the resources that allow them to stay together.

It’s uncomfortable having such thoughts when you’ve just adopted a child. I’m of course delighted to have Maia in my life but wouldn’t it be great if there was a sort of “nonadoption agency” that funneled funds to Ethiopia and other poor countries to support families so that they could stay together. That’s not always possible, of course. There are something like three million orphans in Ethiopia. The extended families often already have too many children, and it’s not just a case of being able to feed them, but of being able to take care of all their needs. I find having one child to be demanding. How about six, or eight, or twelve?

We did some sightseeing the next day, which was a good way to put some of the sadness behind us. We bought some clothes for Maia so that she’d have something to connect her with the Sidama region, we visited a fish market on the shores of Lake Awassa, and took a bumpy trip through the Abijata-Shalla Lakes National Park.

And we arrived back in Addis in the late afternoon. With the birth family visit behind us we’d be able to stay in the hostel for the rest of our trip, and so we brought Maia over from her dormitory to sleep in our room. Being a parent was no longer just a legal technicality established by a court decree, but something real: something physical and emotional.

[At my wife's request I've removed some personal details about Maia's early life and family, which she thought it was inappropriate to share.]