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Archive for the ‘Seychelles’ Category

Ho! Ho! Oh, Hell …

Posted in Adoption, Adoption Advocacy, Family, International Adoption, Island life, Older Parent Adoption, Seychelles on December 11, 2007| 12 Comments »

It’s the 11th of December … ack! … and it might as well be July for all the festive, criscringle, deck-dos-halls-itis I don’t have even a touch of.

Just the thought of digging out my three-foot-tall, rotating, fake Christmas tree sends my mood south and pins me to my office chair while visions of “later, maybe” dance in my head.

With the month starting off with a nasty cow canning my ass from my blog job, refusing to give any reason whatsoever, and then scurrying into her dim little hidey-hole to keep from having to account for her actions, then learning that my darling of a foster son will soon be moving far beyond any observable distance, my mood isn’t exactly in sync with any jingling bells on bob tails ringing.

(And, yes, I’m still bitter and angry over the treatment I got from Brandy and her masters at Adoption.com. If you miss reading me there … or if you’d simply like to annoy her … here’s an email address where you can mention my name, and call her a few if you like: 4802865086@cingularme.com)

Not that I have really been overcome with Christmas cheer since moving to the tropics; temperatures in the upper 80s just aren’t conducive to conjuring a feeling of walking in a winter wonderland.

It’s amazingly hard to build happy holiday traditions and memories in this heat and glaring sunshine for Sam and Cj … I have to accept that their ho-ho-hos will be all about barefoot Santas and tinsel on coconut trees … when the holiday is so loaded with me missing my other kids and the rest of my family.

I can almost capture the smell of freshly cut pine, my mother’s kitchen and the smoky frigid air of the Northern California December … well, right up until the time that I need to crank up the aircon in my office to keep the sweat pouring from my fingers from freezing up my laptop.

Like most holidays in Seychelles, for a big part of the population this one is about drinking to excess and hanging around. Attempts at wrangling up Christmas spirit are weak, at best, and I can’t help but think I’d handle the holiday a bit better with fewer stabs at decking the halls. (See photos.)

I have twelve days to pump myself up for the holiday, but quite a few less to begin, middle and finish the prep that needs doing.

Yikes! What am I doing sitting here kvetching. I need to get in gear, order some gifts for family in the US, break out the tree, find some wrapping paper somewhere on this island, put together a menu for our obligatory Christmas Eve open house, and on and on and on.

This will be a great time for Sam and Cj, and I will enjoy the holiday through their eyes. I will, however, still be glad when it’s over.

Sam with the village Christmas decor … sigh
The village Christmas decor

A local shop in full Christmas mode. Yep. That’s it. Isn’t the razor wire a nice touch?
A shop decorated for the holidays … sigh, again

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There’s no “former” in foster

Posted in Adoption, Family, Seychelles, tagged on December 10, 2007| 9 Comments »

Through an interesting set of circumstances, it came to pass that we had the wonderful opportunity to spend a lot of time this weekend with our former foster son, T.

He doesn’t like that designation, actually, and suggests that there is no “former” about our relationship and that he will always be our foster son, with the emphasis on “son”.

He no longer calls me Mom … I’m Sandra now … but my title is most definitely “Foster Mom”.

I’m still processing two days and one night with a mix of kids that felt so normal, so right, that the thought of it not happening again is almost more than all of us can bear, so I’ll not yet be writing a lot about weekend. Photos will have to do, for the most part.

Mark’s sister’s daughter, Emilie, was with us at the beach … that’s her peeking out from behind T and me in one shot and walking along the beach with T and Cj. At one point, she and T spend a good deal of time in deep conversation. Another little girl you’ll see more of tomorrow, a bit miffed at being left out, began teasing them about “liking each other”, but the taunt had no impact.

Eventually, it was time for dinner, so T and Emilie joined the group again, but T took me aside.

“Is Emilie really Mark’s niece?” he asked.

I answered to the affirmative and explained the familial relationship.

“Wow!” T said as a huge grin broke out across his darling face. “That means she’s my foster cousin!”

The next morning, he approached Mark’s mother, explained the connection and asked if he could call her “Grandma”.

Family is very important to this boy, and with his bio relations leaving much to be desired I am so happy he continues to take whatever he can from the tenuous, fragile and far too easily manipulated connection to ours.

Some words of wisdom from this nine-year-old wonder …
As I slipped into an emotional trough on Saturday at the thought of this time being our last together, possibly forever, T put his hand on my shoulder and explained carefully, “In my experience, it’s better if you don’t think about endings. Think about middles.”

T reaching out to me …
Reaching T

T and me, and Emilie, too …
T and M, and Emilie, too

An evening stroll for Emilie, Cj, T and Jamie …
Walking the beach kids

The kids and Grandma’s mac&cheese. Note the similarity between T and Sam! Goodballs!
Kids eating Grandma’s mac & cheese

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Goodbye, goodbye, goodbyer

Posted in Adoption, Family, International Adoption, Older Parent Adoption, Seychelles, tagged on December 6, 2007| 9 Comments »

If you’ve followed my story where any of the various bits of it have been presented for perusal, you know that the first toe I dipped into the adoption pool was shaped like foster care and has a name that begins with T.

Through dire circumstance, T came to our house and stayed for a couple of years. Although the bonds that built between me, Mark and T did not start out all buttered with love and oozing schmaltz, we did get around to that pretty darned quickly.

Mark held out the longest, with “This is going to end in tears!” as the mantra he chanted until he threw in the crying towel and fell as deeply in love as I had. Of course, he was right … he actually is fairly frequently, but don’t tell him I said that.

Just after T’s fourth birthday — a fab occasion celebrated during a trip to the States that found me under one roof with daughter, granddaughter, brother, SIL, niece and nephew AND T, my youngest — things changed. A week after we returned to Seychelles, T’s mother returned from her galavanting and wanted him back.

With what every foster parent will understand at the root of my being, we stepped back and she stepped forward. They weren’t far, however, so we had some contact and kept up to date on how he was doing. Living nothing like the life style we hoped for him, he was at least healthy enough and reasonably supervised.

Shortly after, however, his mother took T for what was supposed to be a two week trip to her home country. I knew she wasn’t coming back, and she knew that I knew. The only one who didn’t know, or pretended not to know, was T’s father, a 70-year-old with many 20-something girlfriends who had no problem letting one slip away for “a few weeks”.

The scene at the airport was drama and trauma and nothing I ever want to live through again. T clung to me like kudzu to an oak, screaming his head off. I cried, His mother tugged. His father wore a bemused expression. The goodbye was horrible.

Amazingly, it turned out that T’s teacher at the school he began attending shortly after the relocation to this far distant Asian land happened to be a friend of mine … a woman who had taught in the International School here and was now teaching in one there, the right one in the right town out of all the places in Asia. Imagine how thrilled I was to learn that I could still follow his progress and send him letters and photos and such!

I was less than thrilled when I learned that his mother was pregnant, however, but not at all surprised when she and T ended up back here shortly after she delivered. T had a baby brother, but baby brother had been left in Asia never to be seen again. Her relationship hadn’t worked out and she didn’t want the child, so left it with the father … “didn’t want” being her own explanation, although hers was a bit more callous. T’s dad had money, and she was in need of that again.

Although concerned in the grand sense, I was so happy to have T back … not with us, of course, but within sight and some access.

By this time, Sam had joined our family, and then Cj. It took T a while to get the hang of how our family hung, but he figured it out without finding any slight to his own importance. Both kids were a bit young for play buddies; after all, what self-respecting 7-year-old boy wants to spend a lot of time with a three-year-old? He was kind and gentle, however, and Sam absolutely worshipped the ground T trod.

It’s time to say goodbye again, however, as his mother has once again decided to leave the country. His father is dead now, and a “new dad” has plans that don’t include a lifetime in Seychelles. Mom is already gone, and T has been left to finish out the school year with someone who doesn’t understand our relationship or how important it is to all of us to have time for a proper farewell. I will try to track him down before he goes, and will stop by the school if that ends up being the only way to kiss and hug this boy and tell him that we will always love him.

I don’t expect to see him again, but there is no telling what’s around any corner.

I can’t believe how many times I’ve had to say goodbye to this kid, and every time rips my heart out. I’d do it again anytime, though, if it means another hello first.

The boys 2006
My boys … well, two out of three

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No power at all

Posted in Adoption, Adoption News, Island life, Seychelles, tagged , on December 5, 2007| Leave a Comment »

I have so much I need to write about today, but so little time. We’ve had power cut … AGAIN … and this one lasted all bloody day. The impact of this sort of inconvenience is the blog equivalent of a twelve-hour snow storm when the only plow driver is plowed; by the time he sobers up, stuff is piled high as the rafters and it’s going to take days to dig out.

In an attempt at fairness to Marley of Bastard Nation, I need to spend some time on the site to check out her assertion that the group is not anti-adoption, but rather simply proponents of open records. I’m suspecting I’ll find that to be the case, and I may have to admit that jumping on that bandwagon in yesterday’s post could have been a move inspired by her general grumpiness toward children altogether witnessed often on AltAdopt and other places she gleefully casts little ones as the immature life form they can be.

I’ll get back to y’all on this over the next couple of days.

There are so many more topics for the day, but I’ll leave you with just this one out of the UK about a couple that just won a case in The European Court of Human Rights.

The British Home Office was taken to court to claim damages when a murder serving time and his wife, met and married while he’s been in jail, were not allowed to do the AI dance … a pas de deux possible from different counties.

They turned to the European Court of Human Rights, claiming a violation of their “right to respect for private and family life” and “right to marry and found a family”, both guaranteed by the Human Rights Convention.

Anyone else thinking this “rights” business can go a bit far?

That’s it for today. Fingers are crossed for tomorrow to be a day of electricity … and I ain’t talking thrills, just a dim bulb or two and enough juice to get fruit bat in charge back to cranking the Internet connection.

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Politics and life: Miss the beginning of the show and you lose the plot

Posted in American thoughts, Celebrities, Celebs, Expat Living, NaBloPoMo, The USA from the outside in, tagged , , , , on November 27, 2007| 2 Comments »

It’s a big dividing point between American expats as far as maintaining a capacity to take in and digest present day events in the country, the 12th of June 1994.

You are forgiven if the date doesn’t set bells clanging, as events of the day easily float to the bottom of the cesspool that started filling then and continues to this day. To put it simply, this was the day Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were brutally butchered in a Southern California condo.

What followed could now probably be traced as the headwaters of Reality TV, and it ended with OJ Simpson winning the “Got Away With Murder” award.

People living in the States through that process followed along, joined the discussion, watched the glove show-and-dance, knew what Johnnie Cochran drank, how F. Lee Bailey took his coffee and what Marcia Clark was going to do next with her hair. Who didn’t have an opinion on Lance Ito, was more than a bit uncomfortable with Mark Fuhrman or thought Kato Kaelin was a moron? Eating, drinking and sleeping the OJ trail was common behavior as a cult-like fixation drew in more and more media junkies.

The verdict brought whatever emotions it brought, and those who lived through it can still be brought to a froth over specifics.

Those who left the country BOJ (Before OJ) … me, for instance … certainly heard about the case, most likely a lot, but didn’t live and breathe it. We weren’t surrounded by the story, didn’t run into video of white Mustangs and blood-soaked walkways twice a day, and weren’t assailed by details, speculation and conjecture every time we turned on a radio or opened a newspaper. We didn’t live with OJ’s oversized smirk popping up on every corner, live coverage and endless footage of the same scenes and statements over and over and over again.

Because we missed all this, we never moved into the groove that grew accustomed to the frenzy, that began to see the hype as justifiable and the massive media as a citizen’s right to know, and we didn’t for a moment see the verdict coming. In other words, we found ourselves left out of the loop that found getting away with murder a logical consequence of celebrity.

Much that has happened since in America remains puzzling to BOJs like me. The 2000 presidential election is one example; the bullshit blind involvement in Iraq, another.

Today, it’s a CNN piece that has me scratching my head … the one about the University of Pennsylvania professor who beat his wife to death last year as she wrapped Christmas presents. He’s finally fessed up and is likely to do 4.5 to 7 years for his crime.

Excuse me, but WTF kind of sentence is that?

And what kind of sentences are these … ?

“What kept them there [in the marriage] was their undying love for their daughter Olivia,” said Art Gregory, who is now raising the girl. “Both of them put Olivia first, beyond anything else, unfortunately to a very tragic end.”

Rafael Robb apologized to Olivia, who was not in court, and said he was “very remorseful.”

“I know she liked her mother. … And now she doesn’t have a mother,” he said, stifling tears..

This is how cold-blooded murder is covered in the US today? With “stifling tears” and not one single mention of how appalling it is that a creep who bludgeoned his wife to death in the middle of her Christmas prep will probably be out by Christmas 2009 … having to do his own gift wrap, thankyouverymuch … seeing as how he’s unlikely to find a wife to kill while in prison, so should get time off for good behavior, and probably also for time served while hoping to slip the noose without having to admit that he bloody well did it?

Like coming into “Lost” in the second season, having missed the OJ show I just can’t get up to speed with so much in America these days and the point of the plot is lost on me completely.

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Time for another “pupdate”

Posted in Family, Fun, Island life, NaBloPoMo, Seychelles on November 25, 2007| 8 Comments »

They’re doing well, Dinah’s puppies, and growing so fast I can almost see the size increase as it happens, especially around the belly. Dinah is a good mom and has been very attentive, but now that her brood is approaching 3 weeks of age she’s spending more and more time away from them.

Can’t say that I blame her! Eight pups latched on and sucking for all they’re worth has to be draining in more ways than lactation can account for. There’s nothing subtle about a bottomless pit o’ pup, and there are a lot of those here, and a few hours of peace and quiet in the garden or a friendly romp with another adult dog must feel like a little bit of heaven to a mother of eight.

(I know I could sound so much more professional about all this dog and breeding stuff if I referred to Dinah as a bitch, but I just can’t bring myself to do that. She’s such a sweet girl.)

Voracious as these guys are, solid food is already relished as you can see, and because of that, I’m guessing, their mother is less interested in cleaning up after them. (Can you blame her? I am SO glad we humans don’t have to tidy our children the same way other animals do. Sure, it would save on wipes, but … blech!) With proliferating piles of puppy poop plopping on my porch, we’re moving the whole family down to the kennel today. It won’t be as easy to schmooze a pooch when they’re not right under foot, but having them elsewhere will freshen the air up here considerably and provide me with a good excuse to take a longer break more often.

I’ve taken some shots this morning, but they’re not great. The pups are almost more than a handful now, so it’s a lot harder to get a decent photo of them.

A good mom
Dinah and pups

Eyes open, but is anybody home?
Eyes open

A handful, and with big feet
Handful

Solid food!
Solid food

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A typical Saturday … grab the earplugs

Posted in Adoption, Family, Island life, NaBloPoMo, Seychelles on November 24, 2007| 3 Comments »

Ahhhh, Saturday. The weekend. The break between one work week and the next. A chance to … to … to what?

Around here, it’s a chance to play a game of Scrabble with Gay while the kids hang with dad in the garden, pitching in with the yard work … or pretending to … while a relaxed and quiet atmosphere prevails.

Or not.

Today, not only did we have the now-constant racket of puppies a-whinin’ and a-howlin’ and perpetually-hungerin’ loud enough to beat the band somewhere in the upper octaves, these often ear-splitting wails were accompanied by the whine-whirl, vroom-vroom of weed-wacker, the deeper bass growl of chain saw, with assorted power tool embellishments.

Yes, it was men-doing-stuff day, and in my world that means NOISE.

From eight o’clock this morning until about fifteen minutes ago I could, almost literally, not hear myself think. Three men doing stuff … cutting the grass, building something, propping up the banana trees, getting the kennel ready for the puppies to move off the verandah … can make my Saturdays a practice in concentration, a day-long search for a quiet moment, wistful wishing that I still owned a mouth guard so I could take some measure to keep my teeth from rattling out of my head.

Our house is a work in progress, so some Saturdays include carpentry work. Our garden is over an acre of lush growth, so the grass needs cutting and shrubs need pruning and coconuts need picking up. Mark’s list of chores never seems to get any shorter, so there’s always something that needs doing, and just about everything requires some piece of equipment with a motor attached to do it.

There’s an hour lull for lunch … Didn’t I just clean this kitchen? … when the machines are switched off and the mouths on. With the conversation completely in Creole, I don’t spend any time trying to listen in, not that I’d need to strain my ears. Three Seychellois men munching down fried mackerel and baked breadfruit somehow manage to carry on conversation without pause and seem to crank up the volume with every bite. The talk must be engrossing, as there’s not even a second’s let up, but whenever I ask Mark what all the yack was about, like an evasive teen his answer is always, “Nothing.”

Lunch over, it’s vroom, growl, whine all over again, and seeming even louder for the absence.

Knowing that think time would be limited, I opted to clean the shelves in my kitchen, so instead of something deep and interesting for the last NaBloPoMo Saturday post, you get this.

A thought, though, before I go …

If women worked with power tools more than men did, do you think we’d make them quieter?

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Thanksgiving … the act, not the day

Posted in American thoughts, Expat Living, Family, NaBloPoMo, The USA from the outside in on November 22, 2007| 4 Comments »

I am thankful. I am SO thankful. I am really, really thankful.

I am thankful for my life, the fact that I have had one and that I still have one. The emergency heart surgery in Singapore in ’99 was a close shave that puts me in mind every day of what a gift each is.

I am thankful for the miracles that are my children and am perpetually astounded at the people they are and how lucky I have been to have them in my life.

I am thankful for my husband, for his kind and loving nature, his generous spirit, his humor, and for the circumstances that allowed us to find each other even though he was on one side of the planet while I was on the other.

I am thankful for all my family, for my friends, for the people sharing the same plane of cyberspace I cruise.

I am thankful for my home, for clean air and clear water, the comforts my life provides, for the timing and circumstances of my birth that have allowed me to live without war in my back yard or the horrors of life as a refugee. I have never been truly hungry, and neither have my children, and that’s enough right there to fall on my knees in appreciation for.

Because my life is as wonderful as it is, I have the time and energy today to wallow in misery, and although that may sound like a mouthful of sour grapes, there is no way I can let this day pass without spending a good bit of it sad as anything and ready to burst into tears at the drop of a pilgrim’s hat. I am miserable in honor of all that I have that I no longer have access to, and as happily content as my life is now my losses still deserve commemorating, so here goes …

Today I miss my mother. I miss my oldest daughter and my granddaughter. I miss my grown son. I miss my brothers, their families, their humor and their appetites. I miss green Jell-O. I miss the country that celebrates thanksgiving so wonderfully and enthusiastically. I miss a chill in the air and the sight of my own breath. I miss the smell of sycamore leaves. I miss pumpkin pies cooling on my mom’s washing machine and the pattern on her good china. I miss the company of those who have known me for all their lives or all of mine. I miss sharing memories of Thanksgivings past with people who where there. I miss a shared comprehension of what it means to eat turkey and how important variations in stuffing can be. I miss hand-print gobblers on fridges. I miss my childhood, or at least the good parts. I miss the drive up I-5 and my mother’s kitchen.

I rue the fact that I could be in California today, that Mark and the kids and I, had we planned well and done what needed to be done, would right now be a couple of hours away from waking up on Thanksgiving morning and preparing to sit down to an early dinner with some portion of my family somewhere, if not the whole fam damily … if the planning had gone really well.

As I say every fourth Thursday in November: Next year, for sure.

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Birds of paradise, for real

Posted in NaBloPoMo, Seychelles on November 21, 2007| 4 Comments »

After a couple of days of posting fears and complaints about the direction this beautiful country is taking these days, I’d like to provide a link to a small, hopeful glimmer that has to do with people trying to hang on to some of the beauty of the country.

Here is a blog written by a guy who is in the country on behalf of the Seychelles Paradise Flycatcher (Terpsiphone corvine), one of the rarest birds in the world.

It’s well worth the click. Enjoy.

I should probably mention that this bird lives only on the island of LaDigue, one of the nearby inner granite islands I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, and one that I haven’t visited since 1993. I can see it from the road as I drive to town, but haven’t managed a trip over there in close to 15 years. I did, however, see the illusive Flycatchere when there … a few of them, in fact.

One of these days, we’ll pop over with the kids and call it a vacation!

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Seychelles Rocks

Posted in Entitled to opinions, Island life, NaBloPoMo, Seychelles on November 20, 2007| 13 Comments »

My house sits on some of the oldest dirt on the planet.

Yep.

I’m not talking about the grit behind my fridge; although that has been there a while, it’s nothing compared to the soil, pebbles and boulders that make up the island of Mahé and the 39 or so other inner islands of Seychelles.

Mahé, Praslin, LaDigue, and other smaller lumps are the oldest ocean islands in the world, and our dirt here is so old that we don’t even have fossils. Can’t, because at the time what is now our little country formed there was nothing living anywhere — no plants or animals, no single-celled pre-living thing. Nothing. There was sky. There was sea. There was here. That was it.

Unlike islands people think of when tropical beaches come to mind, this island and her close neighbors have never seen a volcano. Our ground is granite … ancient, strong and lovely granite, the only mid-ocean granite islands in the world … and to geologists, granite means nothing less than continent.

There’s not much left to see now … Mahé is, after all, only 17 miles long and 4 miles wide … but where I sit writing this blog is the vestigial remains of Pangea, the super-continent of all super-continents, the one that started it all.

The soil in my garden was here before Gondwanaland decided to be its own chunk, and that was about 520 million years ago. Before dinosaurs roamed, before the places dinosaurs roamed were even places, the rocks I train my alamanda to grow over were warming in the sun and shedding rain.

These are rocks worth celebrating, wouldn’t you say? As ancient as the planet itself, slowly decomposing as granite does over the millennia, tiny residual land masses sinking a fraction of an inch every 1000 years, what else could signify Earth as well as these islands?

Apparently, the answer to that question would be: Well, a whole bunch of trendy hotels that are guaranteed to be out-of-date white elephants within little more than a decade should do the trick.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, these islands are being hacked and hewn at a rate that provides a horrifying example of the destruction humans worship.

Our rocks? Blown to bits by dynamite over and over again, as my house shakes with each blast and I jump out of my skin as the booms sneak up and bite another piece of beautiful granite and reduce it to rubble. And now the hotel construction devils … proudly making the way for environmentally sensitive tourists to stroll manicured gardens and swim in temperature-controlled pools … are employing a silent destroyer of venerable rock — a chemical that gets poured down a jackhammered hole, expands overnight, and cracks and splits what has for millions of years held its form.

Yesterday I was mad as hell. Today, I’m still mad, and totally sick about it.

Sam on rock

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