Looking Back: Meeting Truman Bekalu

I am absolutely sure that there is no accurate way to describe how it feels when you first meet your child. Shea and I both felt so many emotions, though elation, relief, and excitement probably topped the list. Elation and excitement for obvious reasons, and relief because after months of dreaming about this little boy, we were finally able to hold him in our arms and we knew that he was safe and healthy and real.

So we arrived at our hotel at around 1:00am on Wednesday June 30th and set our alarm for 8:30am. We knew that the Ethiopian Program Coordinator for WACAP, Megan, was going to be in Ethiopia for the week as she wanted to accompany families to court (we were in the first group of families who were required to attend the court hearing in Ethiopia). We came downstairs full of excitement, hoping to hear that we would get to leave right away to go meet our son. We learned that 3 families were going to court that morning (whereas we had court scheduled for the next day) and that as soon as they came back from court we would go to the WACAP house to meet Truman Bekalu - probably sometime around 1:00pm. We spent the morning enjoying our complimentary breakfast and talking with other WACAP families who were having court as the same time as us. Then, we decided to check out the TDS Guesthouse (we were in the TDS Hotel the first few days) because we heard there were a bunch of other WACAP families over there with their children. Surprisingly, the time started to pass really quickly as we met other families and received a brief tour of the area from another family who had stayed in Ethiopia for a month. You have no idea how much we appreciated that tour! It helped us calm down and realize that we could make our month in Ethiopia work :-)

Soon after we returned to our hotel Megan and the other families arrived, much earlier than expected (around 11:00am). We were so excited! That meant we'd get to go to the WACAP house much sooner than we had been told - yay! At this time we were able to meet Ato Teklu, WACAP's in-country representative. We had heard so much about Ato Teklu and it was great to finally meet him in person. He was much shorter than I had pictured, but very confident and clearly very well respected by every Ethiopian person he encountered! As we got ready to leave, Ato Teklu told us that he wanted to treat us to lunch before going to the WACAP house. (I should mention that one other family was also meeting their child for the first time that day). We all agreed out of respect, though asked if we could go somewhere fast as we were extremely anxious about meeting our children.

Ato Teklu took us to a local Italian restaurant (there is a huge Italian influence in Ethiopia - we'll write more on that later!). Seriously, that was the LONGEST lunch we have ever had to sit through! I could hardly eat anything as my stomach was doing huge flips, so Shea ended up eating his and my food :-) After the main course, Ato Teklu was interested in ordering some desert and coffee, but by then we had to insist that we leave straight away for the WACAP house!

We then got our first real experience of driving in Ethiopia (while we had obviously been driven from the airport to the hotel, it had been so late that no other cars were on the road and so dark that we weren't really able to see much). Well, driving in Ethiopia was quite an experience! WACAP is so lucky to have Mesfin for a driver - he was great! I think we'll devote a separate blogpost to driving in Ethiopia, as it is definitely an intense experience!

So we made our way through town - it was about a 25 minute ride from the hotel to the new WACAP house. On this car ride, we were obviously feeling extremely excited about the fact that we would meet Truman within minutes, but also a bit overwhelmed by culture shock. After about 15 minutes of driving on paved roads, Mesfin turned onto a very small gravel road and from then on it was just small dirt roads with many, many bumps. Thank goodness I was wearing my sea-bands, because it really was a very intense ride! Finally we turned down a back road with a dead end and we knew we were close. Then our emotions really started bubbling up. The anticipation was overwhelming!

The van pulled up to a very large metal door and Mesfin beeped the horn (many homes and establishments have large gates/doors that are closed at all times and hire doormen who sit by the door and open it whenever a visitor comes). Here is a picture of the door at the WACAP house - it was beautiful!:

After we entered the compound (which was made up of 3 separate buildings - one for the infants, one the older children and kitchen, and one the waiting room and offices), they took us and the other family into a small waiting room and told us that they would have the nannies bring out our children! Eek! At this point we were basically jumping up and down with excitement and anticipation! We tried to calm ourselves down as we were told to try to be quiet and calming when first meeting Truman. Within a minute, two nannies walked in holding two infants who were so bundled up that you couldn't see their faces. We looked back and forth, not knowing which was our son, until WACAP's social worker said "This one's Bekalu". Like I said earlier, there is no way to accurately describe how we felt at that second, but I will tell you that I am tearing up and getting chills right now just writing about that afternoon. It is a feeling I will never forget, and we were so lucky that Megan was able to film our first few minutes as a forever family.





The rest of the day was truly a blur. We were able to spend 3 wonderful hours getting to know our son that day. He was, without a doubt, nervous, anxious, and confused. While we knew that even then, looking back I can see how scared he really was. We did our best to be calm and quiet, and were able to feed him and burp him for the first time. For most of the 3 hours we just quietly stared at him in amazement, rubbing and kissing him to try to let him know he was safe and loved. Here are some pictures from that wonderful day: