African Cradle

By Lori Stime

the United States, integrating into a white family in a fairly white Midwestern city, and adjusting to a whole new way of life at the tender age of 8. 

Now 49, Amber helps others cope with similar transitions. She is a social worker who owns a small nonprofit adoption agency called African Cradle, specializing in placing children from African nations into the homes of U.S. adoptive families.

“I really wanted to work in Ethiopia more than here,” she said. “My heart was there. I saw the need there. … I saw children in hospitals and if you have no relatives, your chances of survival are very small.”

Amber was born AlemtsehaiWale in the town of DebraTabor in Northern Ethiopia, one of five children. Her parents were farmers and owned a fair amount of land. Her father also was active in the Ethiopian Orthodox church and was one of the lead singers or “chanters.”

She doesn’t remember the accident that took her hands. That she survived at all is amazing.The explosion opened up her belly and chest and drove shards of shrapnel into her body – so deep that the shards were still creeping out more than five years later.

She was taken to a nearby hospital being run by Norwegian Seventh-day Adventists who put her back together again over a period of six months, “like Humpty-Dumpty,” she said. A year after the accident she was still having
difficulties, so she and her father moved to the capital of Addis Ababa to live with her uncle, in an effort to find better medical facilities. Her uncle finally persuaded her father to bring her to the local orphanage that was run by foreigners, hoping she might get better medical treatment there. 

The orphanage was in the heart of Addis Ababa ’s “garbage area” (the slums) – not exactly a safe place for children. They ate off papier-mache plates. Many of the 35 children living there were mentally disabled, and as one of the higher functioning children, Amber helped care for the others. Her family visited at first, but after a while they were told not to come because it was very difficult for Amber to say goodbye to them. 

Coming to America

Amber had lived at the orphanage for six or eight months when my great-uncle and his wife, Jewell Stime and his wife Christine, took over as caretakers while on a mission trip.

They moved the children to the country, where the king of Ethiopia had donated his hunting lodge as a new orphanage. Jewell built new bunk beds and Christine sewed new elastic in the children’s underwear. They were attentive caretakers, and when they left after a year, they continued to send the children photos and notes. Amber didn’t know it, but her life was about the change forever. Jewell and Christine had decided to adopt one of the children, and they had chosen Amber. It wouldn’t be easy, though.

It took months toget the paperworkin order.TheybroughtAmber toAmerica on a medical visa, and would not officially adopt her until two years later. She was one of the first official Ethiopian adoptees in the U.S.

Before she left for America , her mother and sister came to the orphanage to visit. Amber didn’t know who they were at first. Years had passed and she remembers feeling indifferent, even angry. Over the years, she had seen other families visit their children, bringing them food and spending time with them. But Amber hadn’t seen her family in years. 

“They were told not to,” she said. “I guess it just broke my heart.”

By this time, Amber was quite accustomed to living without hands. She had been fitted once for prosthetic hands, but she ended up not using them because they were heavy, cumbersome and gave her sores. Besides, she could do almost everything without assistance, including weaving intricate baskets. The only thing she couldn’t do on her own was eat. Food in Ethiopia is consumed with the hands, so for many years she was fed by others. 

“I had no one that was a role model,” she said. “There was no one that would know how to give me therapy. I just figured things out on my own.” 

She left the orphanage and went to stay with the woman who would be her escort to the United States . She was a tall, Englishwoman who lived in a big, beautiful house; she was wealthy by Amber’s standards.

Amber was completely out of her element. She didn’t speak English. Only the caregivers and servants spoke Amharic, the language of North Central Ethiopia. She wasn’t eating Ethiopian food. She had left her family. Though she had been around other white people, like Christine and Jewell, she had never been under the sole care of a white person before.

One night, her caretaker put baby powder all over Amber’s body after a bath.

“I remember distinctly thinking, ‘This is how people become white,’” she said, laughing. “I was sure that no one, not my friends, were going to be able to find me. I’m going to turn white. I was very happy in the morning when I got up and was still brown.”

The British woman helped Amber buy clothes for her trip, a doll for herself and a salt and pepper set for Jewell and Christine.These few possessions, along with a leather purse and silver cross, were what she brought to Minnesota to meet her new parents.

`Do you taste like vanilla?’

Growing up on a farm in the Midwest , I lived in a fairly homogeneous community with Norwegians, Danes, Swedes and Germans; pretty white-bread and standard Midwest ethnic fare. By the age of 5, I had been exposed to very little in terms of ethnic diversity.That all changed when I met my cousin Amber.

She would have been 9 or 10 at the time. As I sat on the floor of my grandmother’s living room that day, I looked up at this brown-skinned girl, sitting properly on the sofa in a pretty dress. I kept staring at her and her skin; she was so brown and I was so white. It suddenly occurred to me to ask her, “Do you taste like chocolate?” Her diplomatic response was, “Do you taste like vanilla?”

“Why am I going to America? What do I know about America?” she said, explaining her reasoning at the time. “And why am I going? I was happy there (at the orphanage) and everybody was excited around me, and I’m one of those people who doesn’t get too excited when others are excited.”

The farmhouse in Randolph, Minn., was silent compared to the orphanage in Ethiopia. All of Jewell and Christine’s children were grown — some with children — and the house was empty except for the cat. She started school almost immediately — her parents put her on the bus and off she went.

She didn’t speak much English and still wasn’t wearing prosthetics, but she wasn’t scared. By then, she was becoming pretty resilient to life changes.

Two years later, Jewell and Christine officially adopted her and she took the name Amber.

Sometime during those first years, Amber was introduced to discrimination, something she had never experienced before. Then one day a boy on her bus called her the n-word. She had no idea what it meant and she had never heard the word before, but she knew it was an insult, so she said it back to him.

Eventually, her sister Ruthie found out and explained what the word meant. The next time the boy used the word,
she retorted, “A (n-word) is a stupid person, so that must be you instead of me.” Then she got off the bus and walked home. After that, no one bothered her on the bus.

“I thought I stood up to him the best way I could,” she said. “I felt empowered. Nobody messed with me after that.”

Later racism would not be so overt, though it still existed. When her family moved to Northfield, Minn., during her first year in junior high, she made friends fairly easily. Still, while she had white friends and visited their homes, their parents drew the line at Amber dating one of their sons. Some of her girlfriends told her as much, and she came to realize the sad truth: there was a line that could not be crossed.

It didn’t completely discourage her, though. She knew not every white person felt that way; her own family, for one, was very different.

“I think I’ve had a very good life,” she said. “I think my hands are a distraction from the color of my skin.”

Amber’s family did so many things right, easing her through that initial transition. They found a local Ethiopian mentor and brought her to the airport with them for Amber’s arrival. They prepared the schools, and they never overprotected Amber because of her physical condition. 

The only area in which Amber encountered tremendous conflict with her parents, a pivotal point in her life, was over learning how to drive at the age of 16. Amber was raised to do everything on her own and her parents never stopped her from trying new things. So when she started asking to learn how to drive, and the answer was “no,” Amber was taken aback.

She asked her prosthesis maker if there were devices for her hands to assist with driving and there were, but they still said no. All of her friends were learning or already driving and she was very frustrated and angry. 17, 18, 19. No, no, no. She eventually passed the test on her own and even started teaching some of her friends how to drive. Still, when she went home to her parents with friends during a break from college, they would give their car keys to her friends and not her, even though she had a driver’s license.

Those years were “horrible,” she said. But it was just another struggle, and like so many others, she would overcome it.

After Amber’s father had died and she had moved to Modesto , fate laid a golden opportunity at her feet. She was 28 years old and Christine was coming for a visit. Amber’s brother Dan and his wife Lynette couldn’t pick Christine up at SFO, so the task fell to Amber; she didn’t even know if her mother would get in the car with her.

During their drive back to Modesto, however, Christine remarked, “My! How well you drive! So brave of you; in San Francisco traffic even!” That was all that was ever said about the subject.

Throughout Amber’s youth, the family packed boxes of goods to send to people in need in Appalachia , Papua New Guinea and Madagascar.

“So my mom and dad’s message to me was, you don’t live [life] just for yourself,” she said. “So growing up I looked at careers. So one of my conscious decisions was I wanted something I could take back to Ethiopia, that I could do, that would serve and also something I would like.”

After attending St. Olaf, a Lutheran college in Northfield , Amber decided to become a social worker, and more than anything she wanted to work with the inner-city poor. Not finding work locally, she moved to Seattle , where she took a job at a women’s shelter.

Before long, though, Amber decided to head back to Northfield to be with Jewell, who had been diagnosed with
Alzheimer’s disease. By the time Amber arrived, he was already in a nursing home. She stayed with him most of
the next week and just talked and talked to him. He died at the end of that week.

Homecoming

When Amber was a senior in high school, her parents received a letter from Maeza, her biological sister who still was living in Ethiopia.

While Amber was in Modesto , where she settled after Jewell died, her biological sister Maeza started calling even more. It was a tough time in Ethiopia. A Soviet-backed military junta, the Derg, had established a one-party communist state in 1974, and a series of famines in the early 1980s left 1 million dead.

“The country was in turmoil,” she said. Her family “kept calling me. They kept calling me for help. … I tried even to petition for them to come to the United States, but I’m adopted so the family relationship was legally severed.”

So in 1987 she and a friend went to Ethiopia to meet her family – the first sight of her homeland in 17 years. She fell in love with the sights, smells and sounds. She started to remember “flashes” of her mother tongue. Her arrival was big news back in her home village, and more than 100 visitors came to greet her over a two-week period. Still, her homecoming was bittersweet; she learned that her birth father had died in the intervening years. One day, her birth mother walked into the room while Amber was dressing. She looked Amber’s body over, examining the scars.

“Now I can die in peace,” her mother said.

Amber had always accepted the fact that her parents had been poor and couldn’t take care of a child with a handicap. However, in that moment, she realized how much giving her up had cost her mother.

“It really struck me that she had been living the pain or that she had needed to have some closure or release from it,” she said. “I hadn’t looked at it from her perspective.”

Cradle’s birth

Sometime later, Amber returned to Ethiopia again to help her godmother’s cousin adopt an Ethiopian child. It was during this trip that she became acquainted with some government officials dealing with adoption. They welcomed her with open arms, telling her they would like to help her place Ethiopian orphans into the homes of American families. It was the beginning of a long relationship that led to the birth of Amber’s agency, African Cradle, in 1996.

Many things have changed over the years. Amber herself adopted two boys in 1994. She married, had another son and divorced. She moved from Modesto to Palo Alto.

Now, she is in the midst of a new change. The world of adoption is shifting and it’s harder for a small agency like hers to stay afloat, with much bigger agencies now handling adoptions from African nations. The one area that Amber has placed focus on, and has expertise in because of her life experiences, is assisting adoptees and their new families with their integration into a new society, new culture and, for many of them, white families.

She hosts an annual Ethiopian Heritage Camp to help adopted children and their families gain exposure to Ethiopian culture — from proper hair care to dance, language and rituals. She aims to bring in guest speakers that provide the children role models of black or Ethiopian individuals who have defined their own success in America . She’d like to open a center where children can come to see therapists, social workers, teachers and other specialists.

Even with all she has done and been through, she still has so much more to offer this world, and she’s ready to give.