They Learn What We Teach Them

Children... they learn what we teach them. From the time they are very small, they mimic our movements, our expressions and eventually our words. Because we smile, they learn to smile. Because we love, they learn love. Life, it seems, is an imitation of actions practiced to art in the days of our youth until those imitations become our own responses and the imprint they leave is etched on our hearts.

Baby Alia was born in June of 1999 in Atyrau, Kazakhstan - a Central Asian country that makes up a vast, empty portion of what was once the Soviet Union. There was no record of her birth, no history of her origin. She appeared a very sick infant, about ten days old, left alone in the entryway of an apartment building waiting to be found. Spent five months in a hospital simply struggling for life, and nearly five more in an orphanage where life was simply sustained.

But when she first arrived to our Colorado community at ten months old, what a fascination she was for those who live in our little corner of the world. A new face not quite like the others. A heartbeat that tapped out centuries of a world that none of us knew. A world where smiles do not come so easily and songs are sang in a different language and from a different perspective. But a world too where people love, and teach their children to love. A place where passion exists... and laughter... and the entire spectrum of our hearts are shared within the backdrop of another place.

She appeared once before a classroom of second graders shortly after her arrival here. The teacher of this class had planned for her to be a cultural lesson for his young charges on that day and asked me to share a bit of my new-found knowlege of Baby Alia's country with them. At the end of my telling of our adoption story, I invited questions from the crowd. The little hands shot up in the air.

"Do they have cars there?" One asked. "Do they eat?" Another wanted to know. "Can you talk in Russian so we can hear what it sounds like?" Yet another asked.

Finally a hand raised up from the back of the room, and a little boy arose from a chair with his eyes settled upon my Asian daughter's face. "How come she's so ugly?" He asked. "How come her eyes look stretched and her nose looks smashed? How come she's not like us? "

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