Day 6 Wednesday
- Sifan woke up happy and ready to play! No tears, no freak out! She didn’t want to change her clothes but I let it go. We played before breakfast and looked at Sifan’s photo album together. Beti told me that Sifan needed to go back to the care center because the dr called and I need to call him back first. So I called the Dr and he was talking very very fast for about 10 minutes, I didn’t understand him at all. He said something about the guest house and that is all I could get….so I had Beti call him back. I heard Beti talk to him and tell him a few times that we stayed at Notool last night. After the conversation she said that the nannies told him that I took Sifan to the New Flower guest house and he was telling me to take her back to the Care Center but since I was at Notool everything was fine and I didn’t need to take her back. So we ate some breakfast and called a driver to come later to take us to the Hilton so Meg could get on the internet again. We took the kids to play at the playground at the Hilton. Sifan was so scared on the slide the first time. She made me hold her the entire way down until she saw Berhane go down without fear and didn’t want me to hold her anymore. We then tried the merry go round thingy and she really enjoyed that. Next the swings…starting off slow and ending…well slow. She is very cautious not like Wubitu. On the way out an Ethiopian man asked if Sifan was a boy or a girl.....I know they don't distingish the boys from girls by blue and pink clothes but I thought the headband would help....I guess not. After about an hour we headed back to the guest house right before lunch. We ate together and then Nuni arrived suddenly to take Sifan for her TB test. Berhane was down for a nap so Meg and I decided to go to the Care Center to take more picture s and video of the kids. We left while Sifan was still there…she seemed a bit sad but okay. We decided to walk to save a few dollars…and I really needed the exercise. (Meg told me later she was scared). We arrived when the kids were eating lunch. The all sat in a room together. The older kids were sitting around a table and the younger ones sat along the wall on the floor. They ate injera and some red wat. After they finished eating they would go to the water spout to wash themselves up. We then took their pictures after they were clean. We made sure to get pictures of the siblings together and took more pictures of the kids we felt we didn’t photograph enough the first time….some are more shy than others so you have to make sure to get them in photographs. After all of the kids were done we got out the parachute Meg that brought. The kids enjoyed playing with it but then it got a bit violent as the kids got too excited. The head nanny asked if it was for the sun……we later realized she was asking if it was a colorful tarp to keep the sun out of the kids’ eyes. Yeah…probably a good idea. We left after the kids started to get handsy and before our pockets were completely ransacked.
When we got home we chilled out a bit waiting for sifan to get home. Nuni arrived and told me that Sifan had an appointment for Friday at 5. Apparently after I left Sifan, she thought they were taking her back to the care center and she was not having it at all. She ran up to our room and refused to move. She is very very big and very very strong….too strong for 2 100 pound Ethiopian women to move. So they tried to get meg’s dad to get her down the stairs. They did not want to force her but they didn’t know what to do. Meg’s dad asked if she could do it another day and they said if she didn’t go she could not pass the embassy on Thursday. So he told them to take her down. They somehow lugged her kicking and screaming down the stairs. Had I known this was going on I would have stayed….i thought she was fine when I left…..oops. Apparently all of the struggling made them too late for the TB test. Knowing the ET adoption process I freaked out. She was supposed to have the TB test before we visited the embassy the next day. We couldn’t understand each other as I asked all kinds of questions to figure out what was going on. Thankfully Agitu’s sister was here and could interpret for all of us. From what I gathered she had an appointment for TB on Friday….not sure if she had the initial injection or not. I called Torrey to call Agitu to find out what she knows and where we go from here to try to get out of ET on Friday as planned.
They kept blaming it on me….that was the most upsetting part. They said that her appointment was yesterday (Tuesday) but Sifan wasn’t at the Care Center because I had taken her to the new flower which was not true at all….she was at the Care Center until 3 or 4 and then came straight to Notool for the rest of the night. Nobody told me of an appointment at all or I would have left her or taken her myself. I had assumed that when they took her on Monday it was to finish up the TB testing. I went to sleep in a panic.