Book #13: There is No Me Without You

Title: There is No Me Without You: One Woman's Odyssey to Rescue her Country's Children
Author: Melissa Fay Greene

There is No Me Without You tells the story of Haregewoin Teferra, who was a fiftysomething widow, mourning her daughter's death in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia when the local Catholic church called her about 10 years ago and asked if she could take in a teenage orphan. Teferra, with an extra bedroom in her house, said yes. Within a few months, the house was overtaken by orphans and abandoned children: babies, toddlers, teenagers and everything in between. Teferra, who had fallen into a deep depression following her daughter's death from AIDS, gained a sense of purpose again, and found new life, as well as praise from others, in mothering these children.

But as the numbers of children increased from a dozen to a hundred (many with HIV and AIDS), and she gained an income from private donations, and families from Europe and America came to her homes to adopt the children, her operation came under scrutiny, and many questioned her motives. Teferra comes off as caring but complicated, but also pretty heroic, hopping in a taxi to rescue children off the streets as their parents lay dying on the sidewalks.

I started reading There is No Me Without You hoping to gain a little bit of insight into adoption from Ethiopia. While Greene, who has adopted four children of her own from Ethiopia, does talk quite a bit about the state of Ethiopian orphanages and follows several children from their time in Teferra's orphanage to their new homes in the United States, what surprised me most about the book was Greene's emphasis on the problem of AIDS in Ethiopia (which is one of the poorest countries in the world, much poorer even than many of its sub-Saharan African neighbors), and the ways that Americans and other rich nations tend to ignore what is happening. Now that drugs can reduce HIV/AIDS to a chronic disease like many others (diabetes, hepatitis), Greene maintains that we in the first world are too motivated by greed and profit to get these lifesaving drugs to the people who need them, a move which would control the epidemic and leave far fewer motherless babies in Ethiopia. International adoption, she argues, is just a tiny drop in the bucket of a much larger problem.