c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) My wife and daughter and I traveled to Ethiopia a few months ago to pick up the latest addition to our family, an infant boy whose mother died in labor and whose father isn’t around to raise him. The child’s name is Bekalu, which means “By His Word” in Amharic, and we’ve adopted him.

In Ethiopia, one in six children dies before his or her fifth birthday. At least one in eight is missing one or both parents.

In the 1980s, the media bombarded American viewers and readers with images of emaciated, fly-shrouded children suffering from famine. Today, ask most adults what they know about Ethiopia, and they’ll recall these images, possibly coupling them with memories of rock bands raising money for famine relief.

But my wife and I trust that Bekalu _ we’ve decided to keep his Ethiopian name _ will live to represent more than famine and war-torn suffering. We expect to identify him as we identify Nicola, our 2-year-old biological daughter, according to her personality, her interests, the way she expresses herself.

Yet Bekalu will of course have his own identity, both enriched and complicated by his Ethiopian heritage, his upbringing in a mixed family (my wife and I are white), his experiences as a black boy and man in America.

Bekalu will develop his own identity. He will also change ours.

We’re adopting for a variety of reasons. Foremost, we’re just excited about being parents of another child, but we also appreciate Ethiopian culture and are committed to racial reconciliation. And while we’re responding to a dire need for adoptive parents, we’re not seeking to be our son’s salvation.

We look forward to being transformed as a family. Bekalu will inevitably change our shopping habits, our holiday celebrations, our interactions with loved ones and strangers in public. In short, Bekalu will change our family’s culture.

Central to most major religions is a call to compassion, a call to become deeply aware of others’ needs and especially their suffering. Adopting Bekalu provides my wife and me with myriad opportunities to cultivate compassion because he’ll help us step back from our own, deeply ingrained identities _ as white, middle-class Midwesterners of European heritage _ so as to negotiate new identities. As parents of an African son, we are now family to people who celebrate one of the oldest Christian traditions in the world.

True compassion empowers us to go beyond the confines of social custom, race, nationalism, even family, to embrace a wider, though sometimes more painful identity. We, like Bekalu, will now always live with the knowledge that he spent his first several months of life in an orphanage. His biological family struggles in poverty. His native country is one of the poorest in the world. With Bekalu as part of our family, these realities are ours to share.

We must each suspend our inward-looking identity and accommodate a wider worldview, one that embraces others who are so very different than ourselves, who endure pain that we can hardly fathom.

This requires diligent effort, and we must in a sense sacrifice our current, comfortable worldviews, even our theologies as a result. If we live with views of ourselves and God that ignore others’ severe suffering and don’t account for the blight of slums and poverty, then our views are inadequate and short-sighted. Our worldviews and identities will crumble when we finally do encounter personal affliction.

My first visit to an urban slum in Africa changed me _ my view of the world, my view of myself, even my conception of God _ irrevocably. The squatter settlement in Nairobi, Kenya, included thousands upon thousands of mud-and-wattle shacks with dirt floors that lacked clean water or sanitation systems. Children, in need of food, health care and schooling, lined the slum’s mud paths. I’m not sure how long I’d survive in Nairobi.

We’ll each cultivate real compassion if we welcome into our lives situations and people who will challenge our views of the world and ourselves, who will give us a better understanding of others’ joys and suffering.

We welcome Bekalu into our family as our son, and we welcome the change that he’s already bringing into our lives. We’re richer for it. But we also welcome his ethnicity and heritage, in all of its grandeur and hardship, and the ways he’ll teach us more about compassion. We have such a long way to go.

KRE/JL END KRAMER

(Mark Kramer is the author of “Dispossessed: Life in Our World’s Urban Slums,” a collection of stories from urban slum communities around the world. He and his family live in Madison, Wis.)

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