Summer Diversity Institute

I didn't know what to expect going in. Six days that started with breakfast at 7am and ended with home group at 8:15pm. It was all listening and talking, thinking and, thankfully, time for walking. A lovely 12,000 steps per day, on average. Oh yes, and meals with more talking and making friends. A real test of skills we hope to have learned in kindergarten.

Coming out of the institute it was difficult to know what I had learned, but the best test was spending a beautiful day with a good friend. Our first stop turned into more than 2 hours at a local Starbucks, sipping and talking. Our next stop was a 2 hour lunch at Pain Quotidian.  The evidence that I had actually processed some of my side of the diversity conversation was a story she told me, the best of the whole week. It went like this (I hope I do it justice in the retelling):

When our daughter, adopted in infancy from Korea, was young I would tell her how she came to our family. One summer, when she was about 8 years old, we were rushing around preparing to go on a family vacation. I made her my laundry helper to fold and sort all the clothes for her and her brother and sister to go on the trip. We folded one item at a time and stacked them in piles. In this moment of hurried activity and the pressure to get ready to leave, she asked me, "How did you get me when I was a baby?" 

I took a deep breath and gave her the full answer to this very important question about her adoption. "You see, when you were just a little baby in the orphanage they had two piles of folders. A big stack and a smaller stack. The smaller stack was folders for the babies. It was smaller because the folders were very thin since babies didn't have much to put in their folders because they were so little. The bigger stack was for the families that wanted babies. There was lots of information about the families in the folders so the folders were very think and made a bigger stack. 

One at a time they would take a folder from each stack and put them together. And finally, your folder was on top of the small stack and our family's folder was on the top of the big stack. Someone took your folder and our family's folder off the top of each stack, tied them together with a red ribbon and that's how you we became a family." She listened, paused and then said, "Yes, but what about those little plastic boxes that were all lined up in the hospital. How did they know which was the Jewish baby?"