An Ethiopian adoption story

Ethiopian adoption
Brian, Mintesinot Solomon, Tesfanesh and Keri deGuzman on their first day as a family. Photos by Karen Davis Barr.

Brian and Keri deGuzman clasped hands as they walked down the narrow, dark hallway of a small but carefully kept foster home in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

They peeked through the doorway of a small bedroom. Respectfully, and as they had been instructed, they removed their shoes before stepping from the checkerboard tile floor onto a fabric mat that served as a play space for six babies who slept in two yellow wooden cribs partitioned to accommodate three babies each.

Three of the babies were on the floor with their Ethiopian caregivers. Keri and Brian recognized their two children immediately.

“There he is!” Keri said in a hushed, high-pitched squeal of delight. “And that’s Tesfanesh. She’s eating—what a surprise!”

As their round-cheeked daughter finished a bottle in the lap of her caregiver, Keri and Brian approached their son, Mintesnot Solomon, with smiles, soft tones and small, slow movements. The last thing they wanted to do was startle him.

The baby’s small fist gripped his mother’s finger as he was lifted into his father’s arms for the first time. Brian couldn’t remove his gaze from the child’s round, blue-black eyes.

“He’s so cute!” Keri exclaimed. She glanced at Tesfanesh. “And I can’t wait to meet you, but I don’t want to take that bottle out of your mouth because I know you’ll cry.”

Keri clicked her tongue to get her son’s attention, smiling and cooing, “That’s your da-da—ababa.” And then, overcome, “I’m so in love with you!”

Brian was quiet, transfixed by the moment. Gently, he kissed his son’s cheek, forehead, hands. At one point he leaned his face close to Solomon’s forehead. A silent tear started down his nose, dropping onto his son.

As Tesfanesh finished her bottle she was lifted into Keri’s arms. Finally, after 14 months of wondering and waiting, of paperwork and prayer, Brian and Keri had crossed a threshold. Never again would their lives be the same. Their family—which includes two other Ethiopia-born children who were waiting for them with grandparents in Washington, D.C.—was complete.

Those of us who were watching couldn’t move. The moment was electric, emotional, reverent.

Solomon broke the spell with a bit of reality from a full tummy.

“You just christened your dad,” Keri said. “It’s official.” We all laughed.

My room at the Danish guest house in Addis Ababa.

When I wrote those words, I was lying on the bed in my room at a Danish Evangelical Mission guesthouse in Addis Ababa. It was 2 a.m. A gentle rain was falling. I couldn’t sleep. My mind was working too hard to absorb and process, to enjoy and understand the events of the last two days. It all felt surreal.

I’m not someone who makes decisions on a whim. And yet there I was in Ethiopia, witness to a quiet miracle.

Was it crazy or courageous when Keri deGuzman invited me to travel with her and her husband across the globe when they adopted two small babies? Was it crazy or courageous when I said I would?

I’m still not sure. What I do know is that something monumental shifted in a sudden, instinctual moment. Keri’s leap of faith changed and challenged me, opening experiences I could never have imagined—and offering awareness I didn’t even realize I needed. For a year and a half, as I have followed this family and their adoption journey, I’ve seen the same kind of change manifest in others who happen to cross their path.

Brian and Solomon
Brian deGuzman and Mintesinot Solomon.

Brian J. deGuzman, M.D. is associate chief of cardiovascular surgery at The Heart & Lung Institute at St. Joseph’s Hospital & Medical Center in Phoenix and a national leader in the introduction of innovative techniques in cardiac surgery. He did his cardiothoracic training at Harvard Medical School’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and first met Keri Tombarelli, a pediatric cardiac intensive care nurse, at Children’s Hospital Boston, the medical school’s primary pediatric teaching affiliate.

Harvard is also where he forged a friendship with Lishan Aklog, M.D., an Ethiopian-born heart surgeon who transferred to St. Joe’s with Brian in 2006 and collaborates with him in the invention of cutting-edge medical devices.

Keri’s love of children and innate nurturing instincts were apparent even when she was a child growing up in a suburban Massachusetts neighborhood. She loved playing with dolls (she had dozens) and often ran across the cul-de-sac to dote on the real-life babies at the neighbor’s house.

Keri always wanted to be a mom. After she and Brian married, she couldn’t wait to fill their home with babies. But that’s not how it worked out. Months went by. They met with doctors, went through all the tests, considered in vitro fertilization. It didn’t feel like the right choice for them.

For Keri’s 30th birthday, the deGuzmans flew to Hawaii for a vacation. “We kind of drew a line in the sand,” Keri remembers. “We decided if we didn’t get pregnant during that trip we were going to pursue adoption.”

Soon after they returned home, the couple filed paperwork to adopt a child from China.

Keri began preparing a nursery in the house the couple had bought in Andover, Mass. Then came a call with Brian’s job offer in  Phoenix. Just six weeks after they’d moved into their new home, the deGuzmans moved to Arizona.

With so much international attention focused on China in the months leading up to the summer Olympics in Bejing, adoptions were proceeding at an agonizingly slow pace. Ethiopia had come into the deGuzmans’ consciousness through their friendship with Lishan and his wife, Maria. As they learned more, they felt pulled by the tremendous need in Ethiopia and a system that, while lacking in material resources, is rich in individualized, loving care and attention for orphaned children. The deGuzmans switched their focus to Ethiopia and moved their adoption paperwork to North Carolina-based Christian World Adoption (cwa.org), largely because Keri felt so genuinely welcomed and supported by the staff.

The defining moment comes down to this: As they passed through security at the airport in Addis Ababa, baby Jesmina in their arms, “we were overcome,” Keri says. “We honestly thought we’d go get our baby, make a donation and leave. We didn’t expect it to hit us so hard.”

But during that first visit to Ethiopia in 2007, they began to grasp the cavernous challenges facing this landlocked country on the Horn of Africa—and the history that precipitated rampant poverty and disease. They saw children begging on the streets and families surviving in deplorable living conditions. That part was horrifying, upsetting. But there was something else. They were deeply grateful to this country for the gift of their daughter. And they developed an abiding respect for a culture of people they found to be loving, warm and incredibly resilient.

As Keri remembers it, “We looked at each other and said, ‘We can’t forget about this place or what we’ve seen.’”

Since that moment in the airport, the deGuzmans have gotten up every morning thinking not just about their own Ethiopian-born children but about the many others—as many as six million others, according to some estimates— who remain orphaned or abandoned in a country that is desperately poor and lacking in infrastructure.

It’s what gives Keri the stamina to spend all day with four young children, and much of the evening on her laptop, communicating with contacts in Ethiopia through email and Skype. It’s what guides her decisions to forgo furniture for the couple’s spacious Paradise Valley home in favor of sending money, medical supplies, blankets and whatever else is needed to orphanages in Ethiopia. It’s why she organizes local fundraisers that to date have raised more than $60,000 to benefit  orphaned children in Ethiopia.

It’s why Brian donates time consulting with medical professionals in Ethiopia and the U.S., trying to resolve health issues that prevent some of the orphaned children from adoption eligibility. It’s what fuels Brian’s drive to invent new medical devices, some of the profits from which he hopes to direct into projects the couple support in Ethiopia.
It’s what motivates both of them to take advantage of every opportunity they can to spread the word about Ethiopia—while supporting the people who are “on the ground” doing work they both candidly admit they do not have the requisite sense of self-sacrifice to do.

I had no idea what kind of week awaited us in Ethiopia. I knew that we had several key dates on the calendar: a visit to the adoption agency to complete paperwork, a trip to the U.S. Embassy to pick up the babies’ passports and a visit to the village of Soddo, several hours south of Addis Ababa, to visit with Stephne Bowers, a family friend and director of the Children’s Cross Connection orphanage there.

That was an aggressive enough schedule, I thought. Surely there would be some quiet afternoons when I could scribble notes while the babies napped. It didn’t happen.

We were constantly on the move. To this day I’m not sure where Brian and Keri, who were often up most of the night with the babies, got the energy. What I do know is that they didn’t waste a single moment of our time there.

Less that 24 hours after they’d welcomed Solomon and Tesfanesh into their lives, they kissed their babies goodbye and left them in the care of a local nanny. The anguish of such an early separation was visible in Keri’s worried face but there were other children whose needs had to be considered.

We spent that day at a village school 150 kilometers southwest of Addis Ababa, where two dozen village elders awaited our arrival, seated at long benches and desks that some of the young boys had carried out from a classroom. After we toured the Sheberaber Primary School, the deGuzmans assumed places in a press-conference-like atmosphere under the trees and the elders explained, through a translator, how fervently they seek education and a better life for thousands of children in that region who would benefit from the school’s expansion.

Though jetlagged and emotionally consumed by the momentous events in their own lives the past 24 hours, Brian and Keri listened patiently for almost half an hour, then took turns responding eloquently to the appreciative crowd. They applauded the tribe’s progressive attitude (it places a high value on educating girls) and the accomplishments they’d seen within this close-knit, hard-working community.

“We will not forget you,” Keri promised. “How could we? Every day, when we see our beautiful four children who come from your country, we will remember.”

That was the first of several meetings in which I watched the deGuzmans gracefully navigate the politics, culture, protocols and personal relationships that guide any real progress that is happening in Ethiopia.

Haddush and Keri
Keri deGuzman (with Tesfanesh) tours Acacia Village with Haddush, who oversees the project for Christian World Adoption.

The couple even had an audience at the palace with Ethiopia’s president, Girma Wolde-Giorgi. President Girma is the honorary chairman of the board for Acacia Village, a children’s home the deGuzmans support on the western outskirts of Addis Ababa. (Keri is on the board of Christian World Foundation, which funds Acacia Village.) At this meeting, as she did everywhere we went, Keri shared stories about the deGuzman children, quickly establishing rapport through the common bond of parenting.

One day we toured the Acacia Village site, which hadn’t yet opened. As we tromped around the muddy construction site in knee-high rubber boots, Keri couldn’t stop saying “Wow.” Seeing this project—this beautiful, clean, modern building, which has since opened to accommodate 250 children living in small foster homes like the one where we first met Solomon and Tesfanesh—was overpowering. Keri, however, quickly switched gears, asking pointed questions about how particular areas would be used and when the property would be fenced and which of the remaining projects planned (including a medical clinic and school) should be the next priority.

In talking with the people guiding this and other relief projects in Ethiopia, an important theme emerged: self-sustainability. You hear it across all demographics. Educated Ethiopians use the term. Missionaries, medical professionals and government officials use the term. And supporters of international adoption—like Brian and Keri deGuzman—use the term. They see the crippling effects of Ethiopia’s dependence on foreign aid. And they know that in a country with millions of orphans, no international adoption effort could ever fill the void.

The best work that can be done in Ethiopia is to provide homes, education and medical care for the abandoned children so that those who stay can grow up with the skills and confidence to make a difference in their own country. The most successful projects will involve local people and locally available resources, and will provide training so that local leaders can eventually assume control.

The Acacia Village property, for example, has an abandoned soap factory on its grounds. Brian and Keri are hoping it can be refitted and used to create a sustaining income to help support the children for whom this might be their only childhood home.

The deGuzmans didn’t get into this to change the world. They chose international adoption to build their family. But the journey changed them. It added dimension and depth to their marriage and a shared focus that will continue to strengthen and sustain it. It brought new friendships, new meaning to their faith, new plans for their future.

Already they have moved into fundraising for another children’s home to be built in Soddo, where both Solomon and Tesfanesh came from. The Wolaitta Village project is being designed with the help of Phoenix architect Jack DeBartolo and 11 graduate students he teaches at ASU’s School of Architecture. And then there is the Sheberaber Primary School and the pledge they made to the council of tribal elders.

The deGuzmans are not done with Ethiopia; they are just beginning. Already they are planning another trip to Ethiopia. They look forward to the day when their children are old enough to go along. “Our children will become an intricate part of this work,” Keri says adamantly. “They will give back to this place they came from.”

I didn’t get into this seeking change either; I was chasing a story. And yet my involvement with this family has changed me. My trip to Ethiopia continues to dominate my thoughts, propelling me in new directions I can’t yet fully define.

When that happens, I seek time with the babies. Because I was there with them at the beginning, I feel that I, too, am bonded to them for life. I delight in their growth, their health, their happiness and their evolving personalities. I want them to remember me. I want Jesmina and Musse to know me. I want to stay connected to this remarkable family and find ways in which I, too, can help the work they are doing on behalf of the children of Ethiopia.

Because that’s what it all comes down to in the end: the children. The miracles, as Keri likes to call them.

Learn more

The Acacia Village children’s home is a project of the nonprofit Christian World Foundation, though which donations can be made. acaciavillage.org.

Read Karen’s related column, “Sharing an Extraordinary Journey.”

See more pictures and read more details from Karen’s experience.

Watch Brian and Keri deGuzman meet Tesfanesh and Solomon for the very first time. RAK Video.

Arriving home at Phoenix Sky Harbor.
Homecoming at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Back row (from left): Dinesh Wilson, Maria Gregory (holding Solomon), Brent Gregory, Brian deGuzman, Brooke Wilson (holding Tesfanesh), Charis Silva and me. Front row: Musse and Jesmina. Photo by Daniel Friedman.