Keeping the Faith
I’m out on the road again, this time taking our mission for education in Cambodia to audiences in Philadelphia, PA, Bethesda, MD, North Haven, CT, Albany, NY, Boston, MA, and George Mason University, VA. All of these events have been organized by inspired readers of my book, Bones That Float, A Story of Adopting Cambodia, who feel that its message needs to spread. I am deeply honored by their personal commitment to our message of sustainability, education, social justice and faith. What a way to do a book tour! This is one of those reassuring moments, when I feel glad I turned down a publisher a year ago and decided to go it alone. I like getting people involved in our movement.
It’s a lot of work promoting a book on your own, but I keep the faith that the hundreds of people I talk to at these presentations will become inspired to take action. Because, my friends, it is going to take action to end poverty and oppression in this world. One-to-one relationship building, that’s what grassroots is all about, and I’m a grassroots kind of girl. I believe in people.
And then something like this comes in from Mother Jones, an article entitled Did I Steal My Daughter?, penned by an adoptive mother of a child from Guatemala. Guatemala is about to follow Cambodia down the aisle of countries closed to adoption by the US government due to accusations of corruption. Cambodia holds the distinction of being the first. One of the posted comments suggests reading Bones That Float, an excellent example of these issues fully explored. I’m proud of that, because the reader who made the comment is not an adoptive parent.
I wrote Bones That Float because I needed to examine the conditions in contemporary Cambodia that create both the child care crisis and corruption. When we adopted out son Grady, I read every book I could find about Cambodia, and I bought 20 copies of the war memoir First They Killed My Father, by Loung Ung, and made my entire family read it. After going there and starting a school, I wanted a book that would tie that war history to the conditions of the present day, and there weren’t any. So I wrote one. My book remains the only one I know of to tie Cambodia’s war 30 years ago to the present state of affairs. The journey is summed up in the title “Bones That Float,” a phrase that came to me from my son’s birthmother, to describe his good fortune, to have bones that rise above suffering and float away.
