Double Grace

“Mom and Dad…….I found out my biological Mother is still alive.  She still lives in her village, and I want to meet her.  And I want you both to go with me.”

Silence reigned as our daughter’s words sunk in.

Through a set of circumstances only God could have produced, our daughter Graci, thirty years old, had discovered her biological mother was still alive in the Congo. She was reportedly living very near to the place we’d met the infant Graci so many years ago. In the years since, Congo had become a place of violence, war, rebellion and refugees, sickness, slave trafficking and abuse. We’d never dreamed Graci’s mother could be still alive.

With Graci’s discovery began an odyssey we hadn’t foreseen. There were thoughts and emotions we hadn’t expected to grapple with, but the hopes and dreams of our daughter were fulfilled, and events unfolded that would ultimately change all our lives.

Thirty years ago our family of six was living in Zaire, in East Africa (now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) or just “Congo”) with a mission organization. The day we met Graci, we were visiting our senior missionaries’ station and home. They ran an orphanage high in the mountains above Lake Kivu. It was a very small house, formerly the servant’s quarters of a Belgian tea plantation-turned-church. The former stables had been requisitioned as an orphanage.

At some point during our stay, I walked through a tiny bedroom on my way to the restroom when I spotted a doll’s plastic infant seat with a tiny, brown baby doll bundled inside. However, on my way back out, I noticed that the “doll” had its head turned to the side.  Without much forethought, I touched the little head, which was no larger than a small orange. To my enormous surprise, it felt warm and soft. What I’d thought was a doll was in truth a tiny infant! Even more surprising, as I stroked the perfectly formed head with its downy, straight black hair, there came a voice inside my head saying, “Here is your new daughter.”

The baby had been brought in by her grandmother just hours before we arrived. She had walked over several mountains to get there, hoping the baby would survive. The tiny, nameless girl was a mere seven days old.  We learned that her mother was extremely poor and had a protein deficiency which commonly ended in death. She was unable to care for the infant. Two babies had died previously in her small, mud hut.  Because it’s cold in the mountains and the other orphans were often sick, newborns did not normally survive in the orphanage. I talked quietly to Ray, then to our other children, and we all agreed that we would take this tiny baby home to Bukavu.

Though there are many more stories of crisis, illness, worry, and tears as we began this new journey, there were also many answers to prayer. After several weeks of learning how to care for our delicate girl, finding the right milk formula (goat’s milk), meds for various problems we had never encountered before, crying and rocking and rocking and praying for her to live, we were totally connected to her. All she needed was a name.

We asked a local friend to help us choose an appropriate name, and he said, “By the Grace of God she was like Moses, found in the bulrushes by someone who could care for her. Her name should be Neema.” Neema (pronounced Nay-ay’-ma) is Swahili for “grace.”  And so our new daughter became Graci Neema, or double grace. She was a survivor, and a year later we completed her formal adoption, making her our daughter legally and permanently.

As Graci told us of the amazing circuitous route by which she had learned the present status of her biological mother, thanks to social media, her sobs of deep  joy touched us beyond words.  We could not turn her down. But how would it come about?

As far as we knew, all missions in the area had left when the 1996 Rwanda/Burundi genocide ensued. The aftermath involved soldiers from several rebel groups fighting each other for territory and minerals, hundreds of thousands of hungry refugees seeking refuge, and thousands of United Nations soldiers all vying for territory, food, and control. These were violent times. If Graci’s biological mother, Marijane, was still alive, how would we find her, and was it safe to travel to see her?

Then there was the question of how we felt about the idea of our daughter meeting her biological mother. What about our own long-held dream of returning to this enigmatic country, beautiful beyond words yet uglier than our wildest nightmare? Where would we stay, how could we get into the country when no commercial flights could land there? Could we really make it happen? The thoughts, questions, and emotions were overwhelming.

For weeks, even months, our hearts and minds would wrestle with these questions and more. We spent many sleepless nights either staring at the ceiling or deeply in prayer. Truly, the ground beneath our feet was shaking.