Locally Exotic

For a good portion of my life I was embarrassed about where I was from, it wasn’t until I got to high school that I really started to embrace a major part of my identity. When I was only one, I was adopted from Russia and I’ve lived in Maryland for all but that one year.

For almost fourteen years I thought that being adopted was weird; in my mind it was a bad kind of different. Whenever someone would bring it up, I would avoid any questions and change the subject as soon as possible. My embarrassment and fear of being different caused me to ignore where I was from. I was like this until the summer going into the freshman year, when I took a missions trip to Ukraine that completely changed the way I viewed myself.

In the spring of my eighth grade year my father asked me if I would potentially be open to going on a missions trip to Ukraine over the summer. I told him I wanted to go, I wanted to see a country that was very similar to where I was born. He told me that the group we would travel with would help run a week long Christian-oriented camp at an orphanage. We were going to spend the entire week there, playing with the kids and helping the orphanage staff with whatever they needed. This was it, this was as close to where I was born as I was going to get.

The road to the orphanage was long, narrow, and filled with seemingly endless potholes. I was nervous, sitting in the back of the van. With me, in the van, was my dad, two other people from my church with whom I would form incredible bonds, and two translators who were also helping out at the camp. The day we arrived was a little awkward, the language barrier proving to be much more difficult than I had anticipated, but I soon got into the gist of things.

I was the only student in the group, everyone else who was helping at the camp was significantly older. It took less than a day for all the kids at the orphanage to make this connection and by the end of the first day I was constantly swarmed by kids ranging from three years old to seventeen. It was the most fun I had in a long time, everyone was so full of energy and it made all of my nerves go away.

Throughout the week I formed many friendships with numerous different kids, even though I could really only say their names and make extravagant hand gestures in an attempt to communicate. I specifically remember one young boy by the name of Arthur. The first thing he did when he saw me every day was attempt to climb me as if I was a jungle gym. He was always smiling and never failed to brighten my day. One day, as I was passing a Frisbee around with Arthur, my dad came up to me and told me that Arthur reminded him of me when I was a kid. It was this sentence that completely changed my entire perspective on my status as an adopted child.

Leaving that orphanage was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do, especially with the knowledge that I’ll probably never see any of those kids again. We drove away and to the capital city of Kiev, and that night we were given a tour of the city, only days after riots had ravaged it. That night I thought about who I was, and when I finally came back to America I was proud and ready to share the most important detail of my life; I was adopted from an exotic country and into an incredible life.