Ella… Oh Ella…

Welcome to my first blog for Guatemala. I am delighted to be representing the country of my daughter’s birth; a gorgeous country populated with warm and gentle people.

When we began the adoption process, I realized that the world of adoption went far beyond home studies, fingerprints and mounds of paperwork. It quickly became evident that politics controlled the international adoption world, and as quickly as one country opened for adoption, another would close.

So with eyes wide open we plunged into adopting little Ella. At no time was I confident that everything would be fine; too many things could go wrong in a nano second. But in May 2006, after almost seven months since receiving our referral, we headed to Guatemala City to pick up our precious little girl. I had made a visit trip three months earlier and spent an emotional week falling in love with a little girl who was a long way from being legally mine. My husband would be meeting her for the first time.

Ella seemed happy enough to meet us, but when her foster mother left the hotel, Ella’s smile disappeared with her. For forty-eight hours Ella barely ate, and refused to be comforted by us. Surprisingly, she slept quietly every night, gathering her energy to face another bleak day without the foster mother who had cared for her for seven months.

I was intellectually prepared for a reaction of this sort, but nothing prepared me for the helplessness and intense sadness I felt when I looked at Ella’s distressed little face. For the first couple weeks, there were sometimes hours when she would just whimper. No doubt she was grieving the loss of her foster mother and all that was familiar to her.

Fast forward almost nine months and an energetic, curious, confident little daughter is running around making our lives incredibly wonderful. I promise that you will hear a lot more about Ella Paola, our Mayan Princess.

Signing off for now,
Lisa

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