Children of Dreams, An Adoption Memoir by Lorilyn Roberts

hand and clasped my fingers over it. He either wanted money or sexual favors. I wasn’t sure which.
    I sat there for hours with Manisha, bored, watching other adoptive couples pass through while he refused to process us. A Japanese couple came in with a little boy in a knapsack on the back of his mother.
    He said, “Their baby is going to grow up Japanese. Your baby is going to grow up American.”
    I sometimes think about the little boy with his new Japanese mother and father. We were like ships in the night passing each other—two children from a poor country adopted into different cultures presented before a man who thought more of himself than he ought. I have wondered, though saved from a life of poverty and hopelessness, if he would ever come to know the real Hope Giver.
    The legal secretary said to me, “Your paperwork won’t be ready until tomorrow.” It was difficult for me not to be angry. I gathered Manisha and my things and left.
    Later that afternoon I took Manisha back to the Everest Hotel to go swimming, but she was fearful of the water. Only the tops of her feet made it in the cold, spring-like pool. She wouldn’t let me swim either. I had to settle for enjoying the pool from a distance.
    We spent a couple of quiet, peaceful hours relaxing. Manisha thought my purse was full of interesting things and loved dumping out the contents. She drew doodles in a little book of quotes for new mothers I had stashed away. Her little scribbles I later called my first “love notes.”
    My daughter now had a mother as a role model and she wasted no time in learning all about “girlie” things. When she discovered my makeup, she insisted on trying it out. She smacked the lip gloss on her lips, but found it more fun to smear it on her cheeks. The eyeliner gave her a “black eye,” but she fluttered her eyes anyway as if she were beautiful. She also tried out my sunglasses, taking them off of me, putting them on herself, and then putting them back on me.
    The noisy environment of Kathmandu faded into the distance as I enjoyed the peacefulness of the Everest Hotel. The Bleu was located in the heart of downtown Kathmandu. It was a maze of people, bikes, motorcycles, cows, and taxies. I had seen more dung than anyone would care to see in a lifetime. One little dog sitting in the street covered with fleas and mange reminded me of my dog Gypsy. He was pathetic and sad. I wished I could have helped him.
    On one occasion I got lost in the wrong place, ending up at the local meat market. Before I could turn away to avoid the gore, I saw bodies of dogs sliced in half dangling from ropes waiting to be sold for food. Goat heads stared back at me. The stench was nauseatingly gruesome with bright red blood covering the street. I tripped over people trying to avoid stepping in it. I supposed the trash trucks came by sometimes but not often enough.
    At the Everest Hotel, I tried to put things I didn’t want to remember in the back of my mind. Manisha and I could be alone without reminders of her father, particularly the door to his motel room that continued to cause anxiety.
    I wanted to escape from the culture around me but I couldn’t. In America I could change the television dial if something made me uncomfortable. I could ignore the starving children, the murders, and the rapes.
    “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Cain asked God.
    I can hear the indifference to God about his brother in Cain’s reply. I didn’t want to be like Cain, but Nepal forced me to confront what was in my heart and I didn’t like what I saw.
    Friday night, as I put Manisha to bed, we looked through a magazine that I had brought from the States. It had lots of pictures of dogs and cats, and I pointed to a cat and went “meow,” as I had done all week. She was intrigued with the kittens and said her first American word that wasn’t just imitating my English sounds, but where she knew what it meant—an almost perfect “meow.”
    I scooted beside her