I lived in Antigua, Guatemala, for almost six months while we were adopting Olivia, who was born there, and sometimes in the late afternoon she and I would sit on our living room sofa and watch Teletubbies. The show was perfect for us because although it was taped in English and dubbed in Spanish, it’s non-verbal, making it one of the few things we could understand together.
There’s a section in the show where the tummy of one of the Tubbies–I forget which one — turns into a rectangular TV set, and leads the viewer into a scene far away. One afternoon the distant action took place in a schoolroom in England, where cheerful children sat at small tables doing arts-and-crafts projects with an abundant assortment of supplies: scissors, construction paper, buttons, glue, and glitter. What I remember most is how much glitter was left to fall to the floor, small mountains almost, until the floor itself disappeared, and was turned into sparkles.
I’m as materialistic as the next person, and like to be surrounded with my stuff. But ever since living in Guatemala, where fifty percent of the population lives in poverty, and school supplies–and school itself–are a luxury and not a right, I can’t throw away so much as a sheet of paper without wondering whether I can re-use it in some way, or whether I really need to use it at all.
A friend in Antigua told me how she donated school supplies to a school in a village north of town. Each child received a Ziploc bag with two pencils, an eraser, a box of eight crayons and two pages torn from a coloring book: one to color in school and one to take home. When she described how overjoyed the children were to receive her modest gift, I almost cried. I had seen enough of Guatemala to know the care the children would take with the two pages from the coloring book. They would be sure not to wrinkle the pages, and do everything possible to keep the edges flat.
One way adoption has changed me is by keeping me aware of how much I have relative to the rest of the world. When my life feels complicated by too much to do, I remind myself how lucky I am to have a life so full when so many others have so little.
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