My Bag of M&Ms

When we started the adoption process several years ago, (11? yowza!) we had to take many hours of classes on how to be good adoptive parents. I remember distinctly that we had this game where for each culturally diverse activity in our lives, we got a different color M&M. Let's say blue represented very white, WASPy culture. Aside from maybe a red one thrown in because we like Chinese food, we had a whole cup of blue M&Ms. The social workers would frown and ask us how we planned to provide a culturally diverse environment for our future adopted child. I look back now and laugh and wish we could go back and explain our current life to those skeptical social workers! Although our first adopted child ended up being white anyway, so the blue M&Ms probably didn't harm her, now our life is radically different. We have best friends at home in the States who are Korean. We went on to cross racial lines with our second adoption, and have our little "Asian sunrise" as I like to call her (she's beautiful, she's Asian, and she wakes us up at the crack of dawn). Except for the days when she decides she's not being Chinese, she's Guatemalan. She actually says "I bein' Guatemalan, Mama." Cracks me up, that one. Among my kids' best friends are kids adopted from the Ukraine and South Africa, and of course, Guatemala. I have students from the US, Canada, Korea, Germany, and Guatemala. And needless to say, since moving to Central America we have made so many Guatemalan friends who we love dearly and will be friends for life.

Aside from all the racial diversity in our current lifestyle, we live in a unique part of Guatemala that is a kind of crossroads between a very impoverished, malnourished, largely illiterate rural culture and a rapidly developing major city with a growing middle class. So, living at this juncture makes life very unique. On the same short stretch of road to school every day, we see the following sites juxtaposed unbelievably against each other: a goatherd with a flock of goats which he grazes in vacant lots, some very fit and stylish Guatemalans from a Cross Fit gym running in the street with their medicine balls over their heads, propane delivery guys with large tanks on the back of their motos (no helmets), and teenage girls (maybe traditionally dressed, maybe in jeans) carrying huge tortilla baskets on their heads while texting furiously with both hands.

I say all the time, "Our life is so weird!" Maybe more accurately it's beautiful yet strange. It is one very colorful bags of M&Ms. And it is most certainly never boring. You should come and check it out.