Mireille

I’m outing us to the world. Well, Jenny outed us on Facebook about a month ago, but this post makes it official - we are in the process of adopting a little girl from the Democratic Republic of Congo. In fact, we’ve been matched with our daughter for 18 months, and are in fact her legal parents by that country’s laws. In a very strange combination of power plays and international politics, however, we are unable to bring her home to the United States. What’s worse, we still have no idea when it might be that we will be able to bring her home. That aside, she is already starting to provide for some fun stories, which I always like to share.

On September 9, Mireille (that’s her name) turned 2. 4 months prior to that she was relocated to a foster home in the capital city of Kinshasa in the western region of the DRC. On various occasions we tried to send things over to her; shoes, dresses, toys, but the shipping to the DRC is prohibitively expensive. I tried to send a small package, about 12 inches square on the top and 5 inches deep, it weighed no more than 8 pounds. Fedex was willing to ship it for $250. To get around that, we rely on people who are visiting the country to mule trinkets over there for her, which happens from time to time. For her birthday, however, we wanted to send her a present that actually got to her on the day.

Jenny played with the idea of just biting the bullet and sending something. We also looked into the possibility of there being an internet commerce site that had local shipping in Africa, but alas, we found none. We finally came up with the idea of just wiring money over and having our lawyer or one of his assistants help us out and get her a gift locally. So that’s what we did.

Now, one would think that, of all the places in the world, you would be able to find a black doll in the center of the continent of Africa. Well, apparently not. What our lawyer managed to find was perhaps the creepiest, whitest doll that I could imagine.

It’s good to find out that our daughter has some taste, however, as she clearly wants nothing to do with this doll. In fact, the whole series of pictures says to me that she’d rather mess around on her phone than have anything to do with that doll! Oh, she reminds me of my stateside kids already!