We left Awassa at 8:00 a.m. and headed south into the hills. For two-and-a-half hours we bumped and caromed over some of the muddiest roads I’ve ever seen. Beneath the Land Rover the road was harsh, in some places nearly washed away by rain. Rocks and potholes the size of cattle made passage difficult. Barry, our driver, shifted into four-wheel drive twice to get us through particularly rough patches. Long rifts gashed the road. The mud was so thick the ruts from previous vehicles passing through were deep enough for a child to stand in and not be seen.

The Bumpy Road to Arbegona. Photograph by the author

Outside the windows this verdant land was lush with grass and hedges and corn and false banana plants (enset, so-called because the banana-like plants produce no fruit). We continued high into the hills of southern Ethiopia, our ears popping around every curve in the road. Clouds obscured the more spectacular views but seemed to vanish as we traveled higher and higher. People of all ages and sexes walked along the road. Men huddled in groups, talking. Women carried stacks of wood on their heads. Children played on dirt piles or ran along the road. Boys yelled at small herds of goats. Men worked together to fix the roof of a bamboo hut.

Our journey to Ethiopia started more than six years ago, when we first began to plan our family. Along the way we stopped in surgical rooms and fertility clinics, therapy sessions and visits with social workers. Two years ago we submitted the paperwork and on July third, two days before our seventh wedding anniversary, we arrived in Addis Ababa and met our daughter, Miralena. The next morning we crowded into a car with a driver and two social workers, and continued this journey south to meet our daughter’s birth family.

The closer we got, the more nervous I became. My hands were sweaty, my heart raced. We knew very little about the mother of our child, only that she was young and that her husband had died. She knew even less about us. What would she think of us? Would she approve? Would she wail in tears and protest that she wanted her child back? Would she talk to us, tell us something about herself that we could one day tell our daughter, or would she instead sit quietly and not respond? Would the rest of her family, her father and her mother and her siblings, be kind to us, or would they see us as devils taking their little girl away?

All these thoughts raced through my head as we caromed along this windy, rocky road. The minutes dragged. My heart jumped at every bend in the road. Finally Barry turned into a field, swerving to avoid three cows who eyed us as they chewed their cuds, and stopped at a bamboo fence. We piled out of the car and followed Choo-choo, our translator, into a small yard. A man in a ragged gray shirt and jeans walked right up to my wife and put his arms around her and pressed his ear to her shoulder. He smiled and then he did the same to me, put his arms around me and embraced me. He was a little taller than my wife but much shorter than my six-foot-three frame. After the hug, he smiled broadly at both of us. Choo-choo said, “This is Miralena’s grandfather.” My eyes watered. For all the worry I had, for all my fears of how this family would feel about us, this man who had accompanied his oldest child while she gave up her fifteen-day-old child for adoption, this man without a word put his arms around us and hugged us—welcomed us into his yard and into his home and into his life.

Grandpa G led us through the field, up a muddy embankment and back out onto the road where we walked about 200 yards before turning through some trees. We climbed a narrow, muddy, rock-strewn path. Neatly arrayed trees created a well-kept, fenced-in yard. Grandpa G brought a long bench from one of the two straw-covered huts. With a fistful of straw he brushed off the bench and insisted we sit. We had spent the better part of the last two days on our butts but we couldn’t refuse his hospitality. Grandpa G ducked into his hut and reemerged a few minutes later in a clean shirt and a blue jean jacket. He wanted to dress up for our visit. He brought another bench and placed it across from us, sat stock still with his hands on his knees and waited with us.

A woman emerged from behind the trees wearing a pink sweatshirt and a pink shirt beneath. Her hair was in braids, her smile broad, her face a mirror of the little girl waiting for us in Addis Ababa. Mother G gave my wife and I each a hug. She shyly looked to the ground and covered her mouth, then took a seat in the chair her father had brought out for her. She avoided eye contact, covered her mouth when she smiled. Her chair was off to one side so we had to turn our heads to look at her. Her son, our daughter’s brother, sat in her lap. He was at least three but looked like he was barely more than a year old.

Mother G was quite open with us about her marriage and the birth of the child we would raise. Once we got through the introductions, the rest seemed easy. Though we were speaking through an interpreter, and both their voices were quiet, it felt quite natural and normal. We asked her what she hoped for her daughter’s future. “To be a doctor,” she said. “I wish that, too,” my wife said with a smile and we all laughed. She asked when we would return to visit and we said we didn’t know. It was part of our adoption contract to send yearly updates and we reiterated that promise to them. As our interview was ending, Grandpa G spoke quietly in Sidama. Birds chirped in the trees. In the distance we could hear a religious ceremony being spoken over a loud speaker. The translator turned to us. “He says that he owns these huts and this land, and the other hut and all that land, and all the land in between, and that when you return you can consider this place your home.” We were silent for a moment and then, quietly, I said, “Thank you.” I could think of nothing else to say.

Grandpa G invited us inside the hut where he and his wife and his children slept. (Mother G lived with her husband’s family.) He offered us a seat on a straw cot in the small, circular one-roomed hut. He poured water from a pink plastic teapot over our hands and then presented a small ceramic pot full of a quinoa-like paste. With our fingers we formed small balls and popped them in our mouths. The texture was like finely chopped, overcooked rice. It tasted sour, like spoilt milk, but with a strange sweetness. This hash was a staple of their diet and one of the ways Grandpa G earned a living.

The paste was made by grinding the root of the false banana plant and then burying the grounds for thirty days to ferment it. Afterwards they mix it with spices and homemade butter and bake it over a fire. The hash left a bitter film on my tongue and to wash it down Grandpa G handed me a glass of fresh goat’s milk. I thought of all the diseases that were teeming in that glass, all the little bacteria that could grow inside me. I thought of the questionnaire on blood donation forms—have you been to Africa in the last six months? I thought of my daughter smiling up at me for the first time. I put the glass to my lips and drank and enjoyed every gulp.

We walked back to the field, along the dirt road, and there gave Mother G and Grandpa G one last hug before we piled back into the car. They stood and waved as we drove away, some of the village children running after the car. It was sad to watch them disappear because I worried that I would never see them again. I want our little girl to come back here, want her to one day meet this woman who gave up so much for her to have a better life. I want her to know all about where she came from and the hut she was born in and the false banana leaf she was born on. I want her to know all this. As Barry drove us away I made myself a promise, one that I repeated to my wife later: we shall bring Miralena back here. We’ll make sure she knows how wonderful her birth family is, and what a lucky girl she is to have so many people so far away praying for her future.