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Pictured here along with Maria is our friend Annie Buchanan and, as of last weekend, her foster son Thomas Emmanuel, age 8 months. The full story of how the two of them ended up together is really remarkable, and I hope to be able to tell it in full at some point, but the basics are moving enough.
Annie is a pediatrician who has been living and working in Moshi for a while now as she finishes her infectious disease fellowship. She has a big heart, a friendly smile and a warm Southern accent, and she loves Moshi and hopes to stay here and continue to work. But she also wants a child, and for a while now, she has trying to adopt here. Several times she has made the long trip to Dar with a fistfull of forms and documents she had been told were needed to advance to the next step, only to be told there was now some other step. There is, of course, great cultural sensitivity required with such adoptions (see Haiti), but it is also undeniably true that there are huge numbers of orphans in Tanzania (due largely, though by no means entirely, to HIV) and a relatively small number of willing adopters (though a long tradition of relatives and fellow villagers do their best to raise orphan children, and also a large network of orphanages — some noble, others shady). Yet of course endless red tape impedes the process.
Meanwhile, as she pursued various tracks over many months, she got to know Thomas and his family at the hopsital, where she has been treating him since he was a 1kg premie. His mother was extremely sick with HIV and hepatitis, but somewhat miraculously Thomas contracted neither. The mother was from an exceptionally poor village and very ill, and it was difficult to keep in touch with her, but she would occasionally surface when her health problems became serious. Seeming to sense she wouldn’t be there to support her son, and knowing of Annie’s interest in adopting, the mother and other villagers had reached out to Annie a while back asking her to consider adopting Thomas. She agreed. But the woman again went “off the grid” and contact was sporadic. At last the arrangements were scheduled to be signed and finalized — last week.
Then, the Friday before, the mother suddenly showed up at the hospital, failing quickly. Our friend Holly, an internist, stayed with her constantly, furiously struggling to keep her alive. One can only imagine what was going through the minds of everyone involved— in Annie’s case, no doubt, the possibility of coming so close only to fall short at the very end. But at last, the mother was able to sign.
In fact, Saturday morning, she unexpectedly appeared much better, and there was talk of returning to the village. But then suddenly, she took a turn for the worse, and by Saturday afternoon was dead.
The accounts we heard later were deeply moving — as is common here, the family members and villagers who had accompanied her to the hospital wailed loudly and sorrowfully when told the news, a haunting sound I sometimes can hear from the hospital office where I often go to work. But there was no second-guessing the decision — they had come to love Annie and knew Thomas would be in good hands, though it is hard to believe they completely comprehend the scope of the change the course of this boy‘s life had just taken.
We returned from Zanzibar to this sad story but the happy news that Thomas has found a home with Annie, who is exhausted but thrilled. She is for the moment his foster parent and the formal adoption process remains complicated. Thomas is undersized for his age and only now learning to swallow whole food, but calm and seems happy as Annie tries to bulk him up. He is accustomed to being passed around his village, she says, so somebody doesn‘t seem to faze him. In his first eight months, he has certainly had much hardship but also two remarkable, some might say miraculous strokes of fortune — contracting neither HIV nor hepatitis, and crossing paths with Annie. I will be curious to see what he is like in 18 years.
