Mamalita – an adoption blog by Jessica O'Dwyer on Guatemalan adoption

Lake Atitlan tragedy

November 16th, 2018

A re-post written by my friend, Caroline Callison Tiffin, who knows Guatemala very well. On Wednesday, a boat sank on Lake Atitlan, with 17 people on board. Ten were rescued; three drowned, and four remain missing and are presumed dead. I’ll echo Caroline’s last sentence: “Enjoy the beautiful lake, but be safe!” From Caroline:

Adoptive families often ask about safety in traveling to Guatemala. I tell them it’s generally quite safe for tourists who use common sense and listen to the advice of their guide if they have one. I think most questions relate the the possibility of being a victim of crime but sometimes danger lurks in more unexpected situations: on Wednesday a tragedy occurred on Lake Atitlan, a popular tourist destination, when a boat traveling from Santiago Atitlan to Panajachel sank with 17 on board. Ten were rescued, 3 perished and 4 more were missing and presumed dead including a doctor from the Hospitalito in Santiago. He called colleagues to report the boat was going down but it is thought he may have drowned trying to save another before rescue teams could arrive.

The lake is not to be missed but many boats lack sufficient/adequate life preservers. The water is very cold and very deep. For my groups I have a local resident and friend charter all our lake excursions with a friend of his who runs safe boats. Although the law requires a life preserver for each passenger this is very often ignored. I understand there were way fewer than 17 on the boat that sank.

I suggest you book any lake excursions with a legitimate travel agency. Even then some pilots will operate their boats while intoxicated and on non-charters will grossly overload their boats to maximize profit. As early as noon on some days the afternoon Xocomil winds begin and on days like Wednesday when the wind is extra fierce an overloaded boat can capsize. If you suspect the pilot is impaired and or if you think the boat is overloaded, get off! Have everyone on your group put on a life preserver before leaving the dock – if there aren’t enough, get off! Enjoy the beautiful lake but be safe!

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Tags: Lake Atitlan Guatemala, Lake Atitlan tragedy, travel to Guatemala

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National Adoption Awareness Month

November 9th, 2018

November is National Adoption Awareness Month and today I’m thinking of ways adoption has affected me personally.

I was completely under-prepared to be an adoptive mother. Even if someone had tried to tell me what to expect—and no one did—I would not have understood adoption’s complexity until I was inside it, and inside it for many years.

Adoption is the most complicated relationship I’ve ever been involved in. And every year, as my children grow and move into the world more independently, it becomes more complicated.

I never imagined that the country of Guatemala—its history, politics, people—would inhabit my brain the way that it has. Maybe I should have anticipated this, but I didn’t.

At its root, adoption is loss. Loss is within, behind, beneath everything in adoption. It never goes away. Understanding that at a bone-deep level has helped me evolve in my role as mother to my children.

Adoption is also trust, hope, effort, and steadfastness.

Adoption is family, close and distant. Adoption is love.

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Tags: adoptive families, National Adoption Awareness Month, reflections on adoption, transracial adoptive families

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Lit Crawl 2018 part 2

October 24th, 2018

Turns out there’s nothing better than sharing a stage with kindred souls. A photo of our five readers at San Francisco’s Lit Crawl on Saturday night and a link to the Lit Crawl Live in the Mission article.

With writers Sweta Chawla, Mindy Urlaub, Christina Julian, Dorothy O’Donnell, and me.

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Guatemalan migration

October 23rd, 2018

To understand why thousands of people have marched out of Central America and headed North, you must understand what came before. The CIA-orchestrated overthrow of Guatemala’s democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 led to the installation of a series of brutal dictators. Decades of violence followed in a 36-year conflict that ended in 1996. Some 200,000 civilians were killed, most of them indigenous people who lived in mountain villages. A tradition of violence, repression, and discrimination continues in Guatemala today.

If you have any connection to this beautiful, complicated country, please read at least the first several paragraphs of this excellent summary by Billy Perigo, written in 2016.

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Tags: Billy Perigo, Central American migrants, Guatemalan armed conflict, immigration to the US from Guatemala, President Jacobo Arbenz

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Lit Crawl 2018

October 19th, 2018

I’m excited to read at Lit Crawl with my Write On Mamas friends, this Saturday at 8 PM. I’m the first reader in our group, at Carousel Consignment on 2391 Mission Street, San Francisco.

Although excited might not be the right word: Anxious, nervous, apprehensive.

The antidote to stage fright is practice, I know. Which I do. And still.

The good news is that by tomorrow night, the reading will be behind me. I will have survived, as I always do.

In the scheme of things to be afraid of, reading out loud in front of people is not huge. It barely registers.

That’s what I tell myself.

Focus on the words and the meaning of the words. Aim to communicate.

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Tags: Lit Crawl 2018, Write On Mamas

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Cooperative for Education heritage tour

October 5th, 2018

If you’re like me, you plan ahead. Cooperative for Education is offering a Heritage Tour to Guatemala in July 2019, designed specifically for adoptive families. My kids love experiencing Guatemala with families like ours: This is a great way to do it.

Here’s a link.

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Tags: adoption tours to Guatemala, Cooperative for Education Guatemala, education tours to Guatemala, family tours to Guatemala, heritage trips to Guatemala

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Poem by Wislawa Szymborska

September 6th, 2018

One of my favorite courses in my Antioch MFA program was “Translation Workshop.” Over ten weeks, we translated poetry and prose from Zapotec, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, Russian, and Polish. Of the nine students in my cohort, some read or spoke one of these other languages. But none of us felt like experts. We relied on a glossary to translate each line word by word.

We nine students encountered the same words in the original language and used the same glossary to translate. Yet each poem or prose piece was uniquely ours. By the end of ten weeks, I could almost predict the tone a classmate’s translation would take, or how he or she would choose to structure a sentence.

This poem by Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012) is titled “Photograph from September 11″ (“Fotografia z 11 września”). It was published in 2002 in the volume Monologue of a Dog. During her lifetime, Szymborska published 15 volumes of poetry and was well-known in her native Poland. She received international recognition when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996.

The images from September 11 are seared into our collective memory. In simple language, Szymborska describes a photograph that captured a specific, devastating moment. I offer my translation to remember.

Photograph from September 11

By Wisława Szymborska

They jumped down from burning levels

One, two, many more

Higher, lower.

The photograph stopped them, alive

And now keeps them

Above ground, hurtling toward earth.

Each one with a particular face

Still whole

And blood well-hidden.

There is enough time

For hair to unloose itself

For keys and small change

To drop from pockets.

They are continuously within reach, held in space

Precisely where

They have opened themselves mid-air.

In their memory, I can do only two things—

Describe this flight

And not add a final sentence.

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Tags: Antioch MFA in Creative Writing, Photograph from September 11 by Wislawa Szymborska, translation workshop

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August 2018 visit

September 1st, 2018

In August, we met with Olivia’s birth family in Panajachel. As usual, we began our visit with prayers in the Catholic church. Olivia’s mother brings candles and blesses each of us. This year, she said special prayers for my father, who had died in July.
(I post photos of my children’s families “from the back” to protect their privacy.)

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Tags: adoption reunions, birth family visits, Panajachel Guatemala

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David French interview on NPR

August 30th, 2018

Two days ago, I published a link to an Atlantic article by David French, “America Soured on My Multiracial Family.”

Today, NPR aired an interview with French, which you can listen to here.

Two quotes: First, French says the question to ask someone who is thinking about adopting is not “Are you excited?” but “Are you ready?” And Second, his advice to prospective adoptive parents: “Adopt with your eyes open and your heart resolved.”

In case you didn’t read my response to French’s original article, it’s below:

My background is different from David French, as are our reasons for adopting our children. But I agree with much of what he says in this Atlantic article, “America Soured on My Multiracial Family.”

When it comes to my family’s configuration, I don’t seek approval or permission from anyone. I’ve become used to the judgement and, yes, hatred directed at us, largely by strangers who know little to nothing of our story. As French notes, the judgement and hatred comes from all sides, for different reasons. Some believe we as white parents have no right to raise children of color. Others believe foreign-born children (especially foreign-born children of color) have no right to enter the US under any circumstance, including adoption; this faction hates everyone they view as “not American.” Still others believe adoption is wrong, period, and hate us on principle.

This is not a bid for sympathy, just a statement of what is: Our kids are our kids and we are a family. Nothing anyone says will ever change that.

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Tags: David French and adoption, intercountry adoption, international adoption, transracial adoption

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