Gifts

Six years ago tomorrow, I was on a cruise in Italy with EM. It was like a second honeymoon. We new that we wouldn't have too many more opportunities to have one on one time like this because Makena would be arriving within the year, we hoped.  We had stopped off in Coullioure, France, for the day - which also happened to be my birthday. And as we were tripping around town, hopping in and out of galleries, I came across a small finger puppet. I bought it as a future present for her, wondering if my daughter, who had floated in and out of my dreams for so long, was even born.  Little did I know that likely around the same time I was buying this gift,  a good samaritan had come across her in the middle of the night and was taking her to a police station. She was a week old. It was November 4 in France and November 5 in China.  She was the best present of all and it would be ten months before I would be able to hold her in my arms.

(Add placed in the paper announcing that Makena had been found.)

Tonight (in celebration of hitting my mid-century mark)  I will be boarding a flight to China as part of a volunteer group (for Mending Kids International) traveling to an orphanage in Luoyang, China. A team of surgeons from Cedars Sinai hospital in Los Angeles will be performing about a dozen surgeries on young orphans to make them adoptable. I will be the trip documentarian and I will be recording the mission for them. It probably means stepping into an operating theater (and praying that my Grey's Anatomy exposure has prepared me) and spending time with some young patients in palliative care, and living and playing with a whole slew of young children.

When the mission ends in a week or so, I will travel onto Chongqing and meet a Chinese friend of mine who will take me by train to Qianjiang. The sole purpose of this part of my birthday trip is to get to Makena's finding place and take a picture and leave a poster letting whoever know that she was found, that she is an amazing little girl, and that she is thriving with her new family in the US. I'll also leave an email to contact us with any information. A message in a bottle, so to speak. (And, yes, it will all be written in Mandarin.)

The chances of me meeting her Foster Mother are slim to none, but I will try in any case. Then, I will travel out to the country side to the Tujia hill tribe villages where she is most likely from, gather a spoonful of dirt, and make the trek home with some great photographs and some lasting memories that I will eventually share with her when the time is right.


Is - on a mission.