{"id":2595,"date":"2014-08-07T10:23:06","date_gmt":"2014-08-07T18:23:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.touchalifekids.org\/?p=2595"},"modified":"2014-08-07T10:23:06","modified_gmt":"2014-08-07T18:23:06","slug":"a-homecoming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/touchalifekids.org\/a-homecoming\/","title":{"rendered":"A Homecoming"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week we have a guest post from Lauren Burton. Lauren is the leader of the\u00a0Find Your Mark<\/a>\u00a0Chapter in Nashville, TN, and she and her husband lead an annual team from their church to our Care Center to provide dental assessments for each child as well as complete manual labor projects<\/a> at the facility. Her journey with Touch A Life began as an observer at a fundraising event, and now, three years later, she is an adoptive parent and a key supporter in our work happening in Ghana. She recently traveled to Ghana with her husband, her son, Micah (who she adopted from Ghana), and her church team, and she has been sharing her experiences on our blog this summer. For the first part in this series, read A Return to Ghana<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

\"IMG_4255\"<\/a>“Mom, why are those men screaming at each other?”\u009d<\/p>\n

We had barely cleared the baggage claim area of the International\u00a0Airport in Accra, Ghana, when my eight-year-old son, Micah, asked me this question. I laughed to myself, thinking that maybe this return to his native\u00a0land would yield more understanding for him than I had anticipated. Case in point: for the past 15 months, all of our family members have\u00a0kindly asked him to stop yelling at us. He always screams back,\u00a0“But I’m not screaming!”\u009d We laugh and chalk it up to his cultural\u00a0background, one where the volume level at which one speaks is\u00a0much higher than it is for those of us from the States. Ghanaians are\u00a0demonstrative people and they rarely hold back their feelings, often\u00a0speaking rapidly and loudly. This was Micah’s norm. His ears have\u00a0slowly become accustomed to the softer way we talk, though, and\u00a0now, barely on the ground in Ghana for an hour, he was distressed\u00a0at the seemingly violent discussion taking place between two men in\u00a0the parking lot. I told him to keep his eyes on the men as we walked.\u00a0Sure enough, they quickly parted company with a hug. He giggled in\u00a0understanding as I made my best that’s-what-I’ve-been-telling-you-for-a-year<\/em> face.<\/p>\n

As crazy as it may seem, that situation was the perfect way to set the mood for\u00a0our arrival. God has been rubbing the type A-control freak dust off\u00a0of me since the first time my feet hit Ghana’s red soil in 2011. This\u00a0was a brief refresher course in the “We aren’t in Kansas anymore”\u009d filter I use for my thoughts when traveling in Ghana.\u00a0This was now applying to Micah, too. If my son could see that his\u00a0preferred way of communicating with strong feelings and loud tones\u00a0may be perceived as anger, I could now see exactly why things\u00a0always feel less complicated to me there. They are. And that is what\u00a0this trip would ultimately yield for us: I would see things more clearly from\u00a0Micah’s perspective and he could see things more clearly from mine.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_2580\"<\/a>Micah’s return to the Care Center where he once lived was\u00a0everything we could have hoped for. With shouts of jubilation and 47 sets of hands passing him through the crowd, he was greeted as a\u00a0long lost brother. Two of the housemoms, Ma Paulina and Ma\u00a0Evelyn, picked him up and nearly pulled him limb from limb in their\u00a0excitement. When the expected teasing over his new accent brought\u00a0him to tears on our first afternoon there, I shared the problem with\u00a0one of the oldest boys. He took Micah by the hand and facilitated an\u00a0instant resolution to the issue. It proved that there is no place for a\u00a0hovering mother in Ghana. That was the last time I saw Micah sad\u00a0until it was time to say our goodbyes. I’ve never\u00a0seen him have so much fun. His mannerisms and laugh had an\u00a0unaffected ease that I achingly realized I had not seen before. He\u00a0and his two best buddies rarely left each other’s sides. He wandered\u00a0our way only when it was time to eat lunch.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_2562Before we left the U.S.,\u00a0he had wanted a repeated guarantee that he could eat all his meals\u00a0with his Ghanaian friends. A day after arrival, however, he declared\u00a0the cooks had changed the way they made things and asked to eat\u00a0the more American-style food they had prepared for us. He\u00a0mischievously scraped together all the leftovers from every meal and\u00a0snuck them out a side door to give his buddies. We pretended not to\u00a0notice even when their giggles were blatantly giving them away.<\/span><\/p>\n

As afraid as I had been of a growing complex,\u00a0where Micah returned to Ghana as an important\u00a0dignitary and bestowed material goods on his brothers, we were\u00a0actually quite surprised by the restraint he showed in passing out the\u00a0collected treasures he had brought from America. I fully expected\u00a0him to dump the whole load of treats in a matter of minutes. Instead,\u00a0in our very last hour there, he realized his bag of goodies was still\u00a0almost full. When I asked him about it, he said he had forgotten how\u00a0much fun it was to run and play there and he hadn’t thought about\u00a0his “stuff.”\u009d What a wake-up call. How do you keep a child previously\u00a0unspoiled by the lure of material things from falling prey to your\u00a0pointless pursuit of them? While this trip filled our hearts in many\u00a0ways, it was this reminder I hope I won’t forget.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_5179\"The days went by too quickly as they always do when they are\u00a0happy. We soon traded the joyful shouts of reunion for the gut-wrenching cries of departure. I am at a loss for any adjective that\u00a0describes the sight of two 8-year-old boys holding tight to each\u00a0other while sobbing painfully. It was the only moment the entire trip\u00a0I doubted the wisdom of reuniting them. Again, however, as it has\u00a0so many times before, Micah’s ability to process his situation and\u00a0articulate his feelings about the experience surprised us. He was\u00a0leaving with a renewed determination to make the absolute best\u00a0of the opportunities he has been given. He expressed gratitude for\u00a0his new life in the days and weeks following our trip that had never\u00a0been verbalized to us before. Micah is definitely hoping to visit the\u00a0Care Center again as soon as possible, but he returned much more\u00a0resolved to his changed life than when he had left the States. Having\u00a0a context for both parts of his heart has proved healing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week we have a guest post from Lauren Burton. Lauren is the leader of the\u00a0Find Your Mark\u00a0Chapter in Nashville, TN, and she and her husband lead an annual team from their church to our Care Center to provide dental assessments for each child as well as complete manual labor projects at the facility. Her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Homecoming - Touch A Life<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/touchalifekids.org\/a-homecoming\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Homecoming - Touch A Life\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"This week we have a guest post from Lauren Burton. 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