It's a Small World After All
I love sharing stories I read about adoption. This one is no different. When I hear them I am reminded of the fact that God's all over this. He has a plan. He knows when we'll bring our babies home. He knows who they are and if they are alive right now He's got them in the palm of His hand. Gives me a sense of relief and comfort to know I don't have to worry. All I have to do is trust and wait on His timing.... which is perfect! Take a minute and read the story below. It's beautiful!
love to all!
Two babies in an Ethiopian orphanage formed an amazing bond—and then were suddenly separated by an ocean. This is the true story of an adoption miracle by two knoxville families who didn’t know each other, but are now connected forever.
For Knoxville mom Meghan Dempster, it was one of those hectic mornings where you’re struggling to get out the door with a gaggle of kids. Dempster had one quick errand to run that sticky June day: to pick up a child’s travel container for her upcoming trip to Ethiopia, where she and husband Michael soon would be headed to meet their adopted son Levi and bring him home.
In the checkout line at Babies R Us, container in hand, Dempster couldn’t help notice a woman and an adorable baby boy in line ahead of her. The woman was an attractive blonde; her baby, a chubby, giggling infant, seemingly of African descent, with curly black hair and bright eyes. “I see this gorgeous, fat, brown baby and she’s this beautiful blond momma, and I just worked up the courage to say to her, ‘Wow, your baby is beautiful,’” Dempster recalls.
Neither woman had any idea where that small talk would soon lead.
The woman was Knoxville resident Mandy Watson, who told Dempster that she and her husband had just adopted their son Silas from Ethiopia. In fact, Watson was buying his first solid food that day. An astounded Dempster replied that she and her husband were also going to Ethiopia, also to adopt a son.
As they continued talking, the coincidences kept coming: They used the same international Oregon-based adoption agency.
By this point, Dempster began connecting the dots of an incredible coincidence that both would later describe as a miracle, a blessing and evidence of God’s work. “When she started telling me about her baby, I was like, ‘Wait a second, what’s his name, what’s his Ethiopian name?’” Dempster recalls. “I said something like, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding me — I’ve heard about your baby.’”
In fact, Dempster had more than heard about him. She and her husband were higher on the agency’s referral list than the Watsons, and this beautiful boy she had never seen until this fateful moment in the checkout line at Babies R Us could have been her son.
Silas’s Story
Since that day, Watson’s son, Silas, has continued growing into a robust little tyke. At press time, he was 10 months old and in the 97th percentile for height and weight, weighing in at 26 pounds – giving his mother enviable biceps and prompting constant remarks from strangers about a promising future as a Tennessee linebacker. He sleeps through the night and drools so much he sometimes requires two bibs. And he rarely cries, instead smiling and laughing, especially when his older siblings, Ava and Atley, are around.
But take a closer look, and Silas’s irresistibly chubby body bears evidence of a tough introduction to life. The hair on the right side of his head is thinner than the rest; underneath, a three-inch patch of scarring peeks out from where doctors inserted an IV to treat neonatal tetanus. Just above his left foot is another scar from another IV.
The marks tell an incredible story of survival. According to agency documents, Silas was discovered as a newborn by two passersby, apparently abandoned in the bushes of an Ethiopian province called Hadya. Just a few days old and severely malnourished, he was first brought to a state orphanage and then to Hannah’s Hope, a transitional home in the capital of Addis Ababa, whose director, a hardworking woman named Almaz, took him to two hospitals in desperate search for treatment.
Hospital tests confirmed that the baby had contracted neonatal tetanus, possibly from his birth mother using a rusty knife or other sharp instrument to cut the umbilical cord when he was born. The potentially fatal condition, which causes muscle spasms that can lead to brain damage and other mental and physical deficiencies, is rare in the United States but more common in third-world countries like Ethiopia. (In the African nation, roughly one in 10 newborns dies, according to statistics from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, although those numbers are improving.)
“The prognosis was grim – they thought he was going to die,” Mandy Watson says. “After they took him to the hospital, he pushed through, but then he came down with a case of pneumonia. And they said he had residual damage from the tetanus. We didn’t know what kind of damage that was. [The international adoption doctor] said there was somewhere between a 4 and a 57% chance that there was major damage.”
Mandy and her husband, Daniel, weren’t strangers to extra-challenging circumstances during adoption, a process already inherent with emotion and soul-searching. Their first child, 5-year-old daughter Ava, was a high-risk domestic adoption as an infant; a year later, the Watsons added son Atley, now 6, to their growing family. The couple, who both grew up in single-mother homes, decided early to adopt their children, even though they are biologically able to have them. Says Daniel: “We didn’t want to bring another child into the world when there were children who didn’t have a family.”
They started considering international adoption in early 2009, beginning with referrals through their domestic placement agency, Maryville-based Harmony Adoptions. At the same time, they raised money for the approximate $25,000 in fees by selling T-shirts that read “Adoption Is Beautiful”; friends also chipped in with generous donations. Eventually, a referral came through from Ethiopia for a six-month-old boy, but with limited information about his health. All the couple knew was that he had an irregular electroencephalogram, or EEG, which could have been caused by any number of factors, from faulty equipment to an inexperienced technician to an actual health problem.
They had 72 hours to decide whether to pursue the referral.
“I’d talked with the doctor and all the possibilities seemed so huge,” Mandy says. “There were so many things that could be wrong, from mental retardation to cerebral palsy to just about anything. There were so many unknowns.”
In the end, the optimism and faith that led the couple to pursue the referral for Ava, even as a high-risk adoption, and later, to quit their full-time jobs to start a nonprofit organization for Knoxville-area single mothers, were deciding factors.
“You really have to ask yourself, ‘Can we handle that? Can we do that with the life that we have?’” Daniel recalls. “But to say, ‘Well, he might have something’ -- to me you have to go in favor of the child at that point. Sure he might, but he might not. I’d rather not bet against a child – I’d rather have confidence that that child will be healthy and be full of life.”
Against all odds, that’s exactly what they got. Upon meeting Silas for the first time at Hannah’s Hope, they were thrilled that nothing appeared to be wrong, mentally or physically, with this child, except for his IV scars and discolored chin. In fact, this wide-eyed, giggling baby so captured the hearts of his caretakers, called “special mothers,” that they pooled their meager salaries (in 2008, the average per capita income in Ethiopia was $280, according to the World Bank) to buy him a traditional Ethiopian outfit: hand-embroidered pants and a shirt. One of the facility’s drivers, a man named Wass who speaks excellent English, showed the couple all the pictures he had taken of Silas, whose Ethiopian name is Mitku (pronounced me-TOO-koo in Ethiopia’s Amharic language) on his cell phone.When it was time to say goodbye, one of the special mothers told Wass to tell Mandy, “Mitku is just one child, but to us he is a thousand children.”
When they returned to Knoxville, Silas underwent more rigorous testing, including blood and stool work, before a neurologist gave the Watsons the news that they’d been hoping for. “He said, ‘I don’t see any reason to do an EEG,’” Mandy recalls. “This baby looks fine. He’s just a miracle.”
Levi’s Story
Like the Watsons, the Dempsters had plenty of experience with the often exhausting, occasionally exhilarating channels of adoption prior to their Ethiopian experience. The couple, who were high school sweethearts in Chattanooga, have three biological children – Riley, 14; Brady, 13; and Grace, 10. Meghan had always envisioned a bigger family. But Michael, who started a company in construction when the family moved back to his hometown of Knoxville in 2002, was hesitant.
But something he’d seen as a teenager at Wendy’s – whose late founder, Dave Thomas, was adopted and an activist for the institution – had made a lasting impression. During a visit one day to one of the fast food restaurants, Michael noticed that on the sheet of paper in the plastic food tray were photos of children who’d been adopted. As an adult, he found further inspiration from a magazine article on adoption. “That’s really how the Lord spoke to me,” Michael says. “That got it started, and I mentioned it to Meghan and she took the ball and ran with it.”
Inspired by Michael’s coworkers and friends in the Latino community through his job, and armed with contacts from friends, the couple decided on Guatemala as a potential country from which to adopt. But their first two referrals fell through, the second because the birth mother changed her mind and decided to keep her daughter. “You’re so heartbroken, it’s almost like a miscarriage,” says Meghan.
The third referral, for a six-week-old girl, proved to be the charm for the Dempsters – that, and their boundless determination. This time, the couple decided that Meghan, who speaks Spanish, would travel to the Central American country to navigate in person an adoption industry choked with corruption and government red tape. The Dempster kids, who are home-schooled, would make the two-week trip too, while Michael would stay behind for his job.
But two weeks turned into four-and-a-half months, with all the necessary wrangling and waiting. In May 2008, the Dempsters finally returned home with their baby girl, whom they named Georgia and call “Gigi,” now three. Says Meghan: “It was one of the best experiences for our family. It was a hard, hard time, but it was a sweet time. I was there to finish out the adoption, I got all of her paperwork and went to the courts, and I’m so glad I did, because after that [international adoptions in Guatemala] totally shut down. And I know people who are still stuck there waiting to get [their] child home.”
Difficult as it was, the experience didn’t deter the couple’s desire to adopt internationally again. In the summer of 2009, they considered their criteria: a young, healthy child, perhaps with correctable social needs. Ethiopia, which at the time required only one trip prior to meet the child (regulations have since changed, requiring two trips from prospective parents), “looked like a good option,” Meghan says.
But the first referral was for an infant boy with a possible high risk for brain damage and other problems – the baby, as Meghan would discover later, was Silas. The Dempsters decided not to pursue the referral, knowing they didn’t feel equipped for a child who could have severe mental deficiencies. “We didn’t feel we were prepared as a couple or a family to take on the unknowns. It’s such a struggle, though,’” Meghan says. “When I called the agency, my social worker said … ‘It’s not that that’s not the baby for you, it’s that you’re not the family for that child.’
“It’s really hard to describe, but when it’s the right one you know,” she continues. “[But] as guilty as I felt, I also knew that because my husband and I didn’t have that peace about it, he wasn’t our baby.”
The child who was right for them: an infant boy named Terefe (pronounced ta-RA-fah). The Dempsters accepted the referral in April, and they traveled in June to Hannah’s Hope in Addis Ababa to meet their newest son, who, like Silas, showed an early will to survive. His story, pieced together through agency documents and an emotional meeting with his birth mother, a 22-year-old named Senait, awed the couple.
Unmarried and poor, she lived with her grandfather, was in labor for two days and delivered her baby by herself, unsure if either would survive. Through two translators interpreting from her native tribal language into Amharic and then into English, she told the Dempsters she had chosen the name Terefe because it means “he saves.” (After hearing that, the couple decided to make their chosen first name, Levi, his middle name.)
“Going over there, they didn’t tell me I was going to meet her, and I was one of those mommas who didn’t want to,” Meghan recalls. “I felt so inadequate – I mean, what do you say? But I’m so glad I did it. They videotaped it for us, which I know one day for him will be wonderful.”
A Shared Beginning
Both Meghan and Mandy were equally unprepared for, and overcome with emotion by, their incredible chance meeting that day at Babies R Us. As the women walked from the store to the parking lot, the words couldn’t come fast enough: Meghan knew who Silas was because of the referral list. Mandy, in turn, had already met Levi, the baby boy the Dempsters would soon be adopting at Hannah’s Hope.
In fact, because Levi and Silas are close to the same age, they had similar feeding and sleeping schedules at the facility. “They basically were brothers,” says Mandy. “And another cool thing about that for us is that … we have this connection for Silas, somebody who was with him during the first few months of his life.” Adds Daniel: “I got the sense that there was a very special bond between the two boys.”
For Meghan, seeing firsthand that Silas ended up in such a loving home provided a profound sense of relief – and a sign that a greater power was at work. “In my mind, it was God-ordained, because had I gotten out the door when I wanted to, I would have never met [Mandy],” she explains. “To see her and see this baby, to see that here he is, in this perfect family, right here in Knoxville, and he’s thriving … what are the chances of that happening?”
Both the Dempsters and the Watsons have plans to take Silas and Levi back to Ethiopia when they’re older so they can have a firsthand connection with their roots. For now, though, they’re just enjoying their children’s integration into family life in Knoxville – and appreciating whatever forces brought them all together in a baby goods megastore. Says Mandy: “Suddenly, our families were bonded for life from this random encounter in Babies R Us. Suddenly, our eyes were open to something that’s so much bigger than us.”
Photography by Jimmy Chiarella
love to all!
It’s a small world, after all
Two babies in an Ethiopian orphanage formed an amazing bond—and then were suddenly separated by an ocean. This is the true story of an adoption miracle by two knoxville families who didn’t know each other, but are now connected forever.For Knoxville mom Meghan Dempster, it was one of those hectic mornings where you’re struggling to get out the door with a gaggle of kids. Dempster had one quick errand to run that sticky June day: to pick up a child’s travel container for her upcoming trip to Ethiopia, where she and husband Michael soon would be headed to meet their adopted son Levi and bring him home.
In the checkout line at Babies R Us, container in hand, Dempster couldn’t help notice a woman and an adorable baby boy in line ahead of her. The woman was an attractive blonde; her baby, a chubby, giggling infant, seemingly of African descent, with curly black hair and bright eyes. “I see this gorgeous, fat, brown baby and she’s this beautiful blond momma, and I just worked up the courage to say to her, ‘Wow, your baby is beautiful,’” Dempster recalls.
Neither woman had any idea where that small talk would soon lead.
The woman was Knoxville resident Mandy Watson, who told Dempster that she and her husband had just adopted their son Silas from Ethiopia. In fact, Watson was buying his first solid food that day. An astounded Dempster replied that she and her husband were also going to Ethiopia, also to adopt a son.
As they continued talking, the coincidences kept coming: They used the same international Oregon-based adoption agency.
By this point, Dempster began connecting the dots of an incredible coincidence that both would later describe as a miracle, a blessing and evidence of God’s work. “When she started telling me about her baby, I was like, ‘Wait a second, what’s his name, what’s his Ethiopian name?’” Dempster recalls. “I said something like, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding me — I’ve heard about your baby.’”
In fact, Dempster had more than heard about him. She and her husband were higher on the agency’s referral list than the Watsons, and this beautiful boy she had never seen until this fateful moment in the checkout line at Babies R Us could have been her son.
Silas’s Story
Since that day, Watson’s son, Silas, has continued growing into a robust little tyke. At press time, he was 10 months old and in the 97th percentile for height and weight, weighing in at 26 pounds – giving his mother enviable biceps and prompting constant remarks from strangers about a promising future as a Tennessee linebacker. He sleeps through the night and drools so much he sometimes requires two bibs. And he rarely cries, instead smiling and laughing, especially when his older siblings, Ava and Atley, are around.
But take a closer look, and Silas’s irresistibly chubby body bears evidence of a tough introduction to life. The hair on the right side of his head is thinner than the rest; underneath, a three-inch patch of scarring peeks out from where doctors inserted an IV to treat neonatal tetanus. Just above his left foot is another scar from another IV.
The marks tell an incredible story of survival. According to agency documents, Silas was discovered as a newborn by two passersby, apparently abandoned in the bushes of an Ethiopian province called Hadya. Just a few days old and severely malnourished, he was first brought to a state orphanage and then to Hannah’s Hope, a transitional home in the capital of Addis Ababa, whose director, a hardworking woman named Almaz, took him to two hospitals in desperate search for treatment.
Hospital tests confirmed that the baby had contracted neonatal tetanus, possibly from his birth mother using a rusty knife or other sharp instrument to cut the umbilical cord when he was born. The potentially fatal condition, which causes muscle spasms that can lead to brain damage and other mental and physical deficiencies, is rare in the United States but more common in third-world countries like Ethiopia. (In the African nation, roughly one in 10 newborns dies, according to statistics from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, although those numbers are improving.)
“The prognosis was grim – they thought he was going to die,” Mandy Watson says. “After they took him to the hospital, he pushed through, but then he came down with a case of pneumonia. And they said he had residual damage from the tetanus. We didn’t know what kind of damage that was. [The international adoption doctor] said there was somewhere between a 4 and a 57% chance that there was major damage.”
Mandy and her husband, Daniel, weren’t strangers to extra-challenging circumstances during adoption, a process already inherent with emotion and soul-searching. Their first child, 5-year-old daughter Ava, was a high-risk domestic adoption as an infant; a year later, the Watsons added son Atley, now 6, to their growing family. The couple, who both grew up in single-mother homes, decided early to adopt their children, even though they are biologically able to have them. Says Daniel: “We didn’t want to bring another child into the world when there were children who didn’t have a family.”
They started considering international adoption in early 2009, beginning with referrals through their domestic placement agency, Maryville-based Harmony Adoptions. At the same time, they raised money for the approximate $25,000 in fees by selling T-shirts that read “Adoption Is Beautiful”; friends also chipped in with generous donations. Eventually, a referral came through from Ethiopia for a six-month-old boy, but with limited information about his health. All the couple knew was that he had an irregular electroencephalogram, or EEG, which could have been caused by any number of factors, from faulty equipment to an inexperienced technician to an actual health problem.
They had 72 hours to decide whether to pursue the referral.
“I’d talked with the doctor and all the possibilities seemed so huge,” Mandy says. “There were so many things that could be wrong, from mental retardation to cerebral palsy to just about anything. There were so many unknowns.”
In the end, the optimism and faith that led the couple to pursue the referral for Ava, even as a high-risk adoption, and later, to quit their full-time jobs to start a nonprofit organization for Knoxville-area single mothers, were deciding factors.
“You really have to ask yourself, ‘Can we handle that? Can we do that with the life that we have?’” Daniel recalls. “But to say, ‘Well, he might have something’ -- to me you have to go in favor of the child at that point. Sure he might, but he might not. I’d rather not bet against a child – I’d rather have confidence that that child will be healthy and be full of life.”
Against all odds, that’s exactly what they got. Upon meeting Silas for the first time at Hannah’s Hope, they were thrilled that nothing appeared to be wrong, mentally or physically, with this child, except for his IV scars and discolored chin. In fact, this wide-eyed, giggling baby so captured the hearts of his caretakers, called “special mothers,” that they pooled their meager salaries (in 2008, the average per capita income in Ethiopia was $280, according to the World Bank) to buy him a traditional Ethiopian outfit: hand-embroidered pants and a shirt. One of the facility’s drivers, a man named Wass who speaks excellent English, showed the couple all the pictures he had taken of Silas, whose Ethiopian name is Mitku (pronounced me-TOO-koo in Ethiopia’s Amharic language) on his cell phone.When it was time to say goodbye, one of the special mothers told Wass to tell Mandy, “Mitku is just one child, but to us he is a thousand children.”
When they returned to Knoxville, Silas underwent more rigorous testing, including blood and stool work, before a neurologist gave the Watsons the news that they’d been hoping for. “He said, ‘I don’t see any reason to do an EEG,’” Mandy recalls. “This baby looks fine. He’s just a miracle.”
Levi’s Story
Like the Watsons, the Dempsters had plenty of experience with the often exhausting, occasionally exhilarating channels of adoption prior to their Ethiopian experience. The couple, who were high school sweethearts in Chattanooga, have three biological children – Riley, 14; Brady, 13; and Grace, 10. Meghan had always envisioned a bigger family. But Michael, who started a company in construction when the family moved back to his hometown of Knoxville in 2002, was hesitant.
But something he’d seen as a teenager at Wendy’s – whose late founder, Dave Thomas, was adopted and an activist for the institution – had made a lasting impression. During a visit one day to one of the fast food restaurants, Michael noticed that on the sheet of paper in the plastic food tray were photos of children who’d been adopted. As an adult, he found further inspiration from a magazine article on adoption. “That’s really how the Lord spoke to me,” Michael says. “That got it started, and I mentioned it to Meghan and she took the ball and ran with it.”
Inspired by Michael’s coworkers and friends in the Latino community through his job, and armed with contacts from friends, the couple decided on Guatemala as a potential country from which to adopt. But their first two referrals fell through, the second because the birth mother changed her mind and decided to keep her daughter. “You’re so heartbroken, it’s almost like a miscarriage,” says Meghan.
The third referral, for a six-week-old girl, proved to be the charm for the Dempsters – that, and their boundless determination. This time, the couple decided that Meghan, who speaks Spanish, would travel to the Central American country to navigate in person an adoption industry choked with corruption and government red tape. The Dempster kids, who are home-schooled, would make the two-week trip too, while Michael would stay behind for his job.
But two weeks turned into four-and-a-half months, with all the necessary wrangling and waiting. In May 2008, the Dempsters finally returned home with their baby girl, whom they named Georgia and call “Gigi,” now three. Says Meghan: “It was one of the best experiences for our family. It was a hard, hard time, but it was a sweet time. I was there to finish out the adoption, I got all of her paperwork and went to the courts, and I’m so glad I did, because after that [international adoptions in Guatemala] totally shut down. And I know people who are still stuck there waiting to get [their] child home.”
Difficult as it was, the experience didn’t deter the couple’s desire to adopt internationally again. In the summer of 2009, they considered their criteria: a young, healthy child, perhaps with correctable social needs. Ethiopia, which at the time required only one trip prior to meet the child (regulations have since changed, requiring two trips from prospective parents), “looked like a good option,” Meghan says.
But the first referral was for an infant boy with a possible high risk for brain damage and other problems – the baby, as Meghan would discover later, was Silas. The Dempsters decided not to pursue the referral, knowing they didn’t feel equipped for a child who could have severe mental deficiencies. “We didn’t feel we were prepared as a couple or a family to take on the unknowns. It’s such a struggle, though,’” Meghan says. “When I called the agency, my social worker said … ‘It’s not that that’s not the baby for you, it’s that you’re not the family for that child.’
“It’s really hard to describe, but when it’s the right one you know,” she continues. “[But] as guilty as I felt, I also knew that because my husband and I didn’t have that peace about it, he wasn’t our baby.”
The child who was right for them: an infant boy named Terefe (pronounced ta-RA-fah). The Dempsters accepted the referral in April, and they traveled in June to Hannah’s Hope in Addis Ababa to meet their newest son, who, like Silas, showed an early will to survive. His story, pieced together through agency documents and an emotional meeting with his birth mother, a 22-year-old named Senait, awed the couple.
Unmarried and poor, she lived with her grandfather, was in labor for two days and delivered her baby by herself, unsure if either would survive. Through two translators interpreting from her native tribal language into Amharic and then into English, she told the Dempsters she had chosen the name Terefe because it means “he saves.” (After hearing that, the couple decided to make their chosen first name, Levi, his middle name.)
“Going over there, they didn’t tell me I was going to meet her, and I was one of those mommas who didn’t want to,” Meghan recalls. “I felt so inadequate – I mean, what do you say? But I’m so glad I did it. They videotaped it for us, which I know one day for him will be wonderful.”
A Shared Beginning
Both Meghan and Mandy were equally unprepared for, and overcome with emotion by, their incredible chance meeting that day at Babies R Us. As the women walked from the store to the parking lot, the words couldn’t come fast enough: Meghan knew who Silas was because of the referral list. Mandy, in turn, had already met Levi, the baby boy the Dempsters would soon be adopting at Hannah’s Hope.
In fact, because Levi and Silas are close to the same age, they had similar feeding and sleeping schedules at the facility. “They basically were brothers,” says Mandy. “And another cool thing about that for us is that … we have this connection for Silas, somebody who was with him during the first few months of his life.” Adds Daniel: “I got the sense that there was a very special bond between the two boys.”
For Meghan, seeing firsthand that Silas ended up in such a loving home provided a profound sense of relief – and a sign that a greater power was at work. “In my mind, it was God-ordained, because had I gotten out the door when I wanted to, I would have never met [Mandy],” she explains. “To see her and see this baby, to see that here he is, in this perfect family, right here in Knoxville, and he’s thriving … what are the chances of that happening?”
Both the Dempsters and the Watsons have plans to take Silas and Levi back to Ethiopia when they’re older so they can have a firsthand connection with their roots. For now, though, they’re just enjoying their children’s integration into family life in Knoxville – and appreciating whatever forces brought them all together in a baby goods megastore. Says Mandy: “Suddenly, our families were bonded for life from this random encounter in Babies R Us. Suddenly, our eyes were open to something that’s so much bigger than us.”
Photography by Jimmy Chiarella
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