Family Stories

The Afman Family

The reason Nancy Afman wanted to adopt a third child was simple.
"I just wanted more kids,", Nancy explained. "I love children." What happened after she adopted again was much more complicated.

Nancy is a single mother. She had two older daughters she had adopted many years before through AAI from India, Preya Jean, who is now 21 and Kathyrn Bhavna, now 17. When she decided to add to her family, she wanted to find an older girl who'd waited a long time to get a family. Before long she'd settled on Frehiwot, an Ethiopian girl she'd seen on an AAI video.

Frehiwot was eight years old when she came home in July of 2004. Her transition to her new life was not easy. "She cried day and night," Nancy says, "she said she hated it here all the time. One day I was taking her to school and she tossed the banana from her lunch box at me." Through it all, Nancy and her two more grown children did their best to stay loving and in control. "I knew it wasn't me, it was her having a hard time adjusting and that I had to be here for her," Nancy says now. "I never in any way indicated that I wouldn't keep her, I just kept saying, we're you're family and we love you."

Maybe it's a coincidence that Frehiwot's turning point came at nine months, or maybe that's just how long it takes for a new life to begin. It started with a trip back to Ethiopia. "All of her childhood had been wiped away from her," Afman explains. "We went back and she was able to see her half sister for the first time in six years and we saw her parents' graves. We were able to reconstruct her childhood and then she was much more settled."

Nancy says that every day, "all I tried to do was the right thing. Every time, every day, just do the right thing. I got advice from the AAI web group. I stayed humble. And I made sure she knew that she was my kid and that there was no place else she was going. And now? Call the Afman home and you can hear Frehiwot singing happily in the background as you talk to her mother. Better still, Nancy says, "to this day she'll say 'I remember when I threw my lunchbox banana and you would always say I love you.'"

Frehiwot plays soccer and basketball and is doing better and better in school. In fact, things got so much better at the Afman household that the family decided to adopt another girl, Meseret. Meseret was thirteen when she came home in June of 2006. Her transition was relatively simple. Of course she had her sister Frehiwot to help show her the way.

Now the two girls are as close as, well, sisters. "They almost never argue," their mother says happily. Nancy's life is busy, but she likes it that way. "I swim every morning and then the rest of the time I'm working in one way or another, but they give me energy. They're so full of life and sparkle, it's invigorating. I just can't imagine living without these children."

Nancy has advice for families considering adopting; be patient, be loving, be humble and get help when you need it, but it's Frehiwot who gets the last word here with advice she had for her mother, when the family was considering adopting again. "When one child we thought about adopting wasn't available," Nancy explains as Frehiwot sings somewhere in a nearby room, "Frehiwot told me that it was okay because I could always get a kid we didn't know much about so that we could get to discover who they are and that they're funny and a good all-around-kid like her." It's good advice, and the whole Afman family knows from experience that it's true.

The Henderson Family

Erin Henderson and her husband Josh had three boys when they first decided to bring another child into their lives. "We thought we'd adopt a girl," Erin says with a laugh, "and then we'd have the perfect family, three boys and a baby girl." Things however, didn't go quite as planned.

To begin with, not long after they'd adopted their daughter Maggie, Josh and Erin decided that they didn't want her growing up as the only adopted child in their family, so they decided to adopt Maggie's sister, Amanda. Both girls are five now. "They tell everyone they're twins," Erin says, "and we're always saying, 'you're not even from the same country!?'"

From there, the story gets a bit more complicated. There were domestic adoptions and international adoptions, the family of five became the family of six, then seven and now (gulp) ten. "It's sort of like we forgot to take our adoption birth control," Josh says. A few months ago, the Henderson's had their tenth child, Belane, a three year old girl from Ethiopia. "It wasn't something we expected," Erin says. "We were in Ethiopia to pick up our son Ben and while we were there, we went to the AHOPE orphanage to drop off some donations. Belane was there and there was just something about her that melted us. We left and we never thought we'd see her again. We got home on a Sunday and called AAI Monday morning. Belane is HIV positive, so we did do some research about HIV, but then we knew we wanted to commit to bringing her home."

So far, Belane has had no trouble fitting right in. "I stayed in Addis for two weeks with her," Erin explains, "so she bonded with me pretty quickly. And we'd made a photo album for her so she knew all the kids and Josh. And now she's bonded with him really well too."

So, what's life like with eleven year old Mercades, ten year old Nathan, nine year old Ryan, nine year old Destinee, seven year old Shane, six year old Ben, five year old Amanda, five year old Maggie, three year old Marcus, and newest addition, three year old Belane? "Structured," Erin says with another laugh. "We find the kids are happiest if we do everything, meals and naps, all on a schedule." And Erin is able to work from home, where she's paid to write a blog about, you guessed it, adoption – www.transracial.adoptionblogs.com – which Erin points out helps a lot.

The Henderson children meanwhile wouldn't change a thing about their family. "I think we'd have twenty children if we left it up to them," Erin says. "If the kids didn't think that adopting was a good idea, we might feel like we'd done the wrong thing. But Belane got them all wrapped around her little pinky pretty darn quick." And why not? After all, it isn't the family Erin and Josh imagined they'd have, but it's perfect all the same.

The Knobler Family

For Claude and Mary Knobler, it all started with a magazine article. "I'd read an article in the Sunday paper about Ethiopia's orphans and the work AAI was doing to help those kids," Claude says. "Something just clicked with me, and I realized that we could be one of those families that adopted a child." Neither Claude nor Mary had ever thought about adopting a child before that day. "It was," Mary says, "the last thing either of us ever planned on doing. But we just kept thinking about it and inching forward a little bit at a time till everything came together."

For the Knoblers, 'inching forward,' started with a call to AAI. Mary began reading and participating in the AAI chat rooms. They filled out paperwork, "just in case." Next, they asked to be put on the list of people who received videos of children waiting to be adopted. "Watching those videos was so hard," Mary says, "we just didn't know how we'd ever make that kind of decision. Should we adopt? And if we did adopt, how would we ever know which child was the one for us? And everyone we talked to kept saying to us, 'when it's right, you'll know.' And then it turned out, that was the truth. "As soon as we saw Nati, we just knew."

Nati was, when the Knoblers first saw him, a five year old Ethiopian boy who spoke no English. "There was just something about him," Claude says, "he was a little silly and somehow as soon as we saw him, all of us, Mary, me, both of our kids, all started jumping up and down, because we knew he was the one." The Knoblers called AAI and said they'd found their child.

"Of course, we were still worried," Mary says. "We had two children already. Our son Clay was seven and our daughter Grace was just five. We didn't know how adding a child would affect them, but it seemed right, so we took the plunge." Not that many months later, Claude was on his way to Ethiopia to bring home his son.

"It was a hard, hard trip," Claude says. "But the first time we laid eyes on each other, Nati walked right up to me and gave me one of the best hugs I've ever gotten. I spent a week in Ethiopia and it was all so heartbreaking. But seeing all that Nati had been through made me so sure that we'd done the right thing."

And since then? Claude and Mary both laugh. "Well, our house has certainly gotten busier," Mary says as kids race around her. "When Nati got here, he didn't speak a word of English, but he was so quick to get it all. Within a few months he was pretty close to fluent. And now of course?" Mary laughs again. "Well, now Nati is just one of the family. He plays football and video games and goes to the same school as Clay and Grace. He's got friends and pets and his teacher loves him. It's amazing after all he's been through, but he's really just one of the kids. He and Clay and Grace all do everything brothers and sisters do. They play together, they argue together, they have so much fun together. I know we came together a bit differently than most families, but at the end of the day, that doesn't matter much. We're a family. I wouldn't change anything for all the world."