'From zero to four'

Matthew Morgan-Jones, a Dubai resident and the UAE director for the NGO All As One, has adopted four children from Sierra Leone.

Matthew Morgan-Jones and his four adopted children from Sierra Leone.

Madonna did it. Angelina Jolie did it. Katherine Heigl is about to do it. Elton John is talking about doing it. Celebrity foreign adoptions soak up tabloid ink and raise ratings on late-night TV for good reason. They're happy stories of famous people - people who have everything - finding a new focus and purpose in life, finding love in the waiting arms of a child in an overcrowded orphanage in Ukraine or Mali or Guatemala, a child who needs a family more than anything in the world. They are love stories, make no mistake about it, and none of us is immune to being moved by them.

But what comes next? And what does it really entail? John, bless his good intentions, probably doesn't know. After visiting a Ukrainian orphanage last week, where he and his partner fell head over heels with a toddler named Lev, John admitted that not only had he never seriously considered adoption until that day, but that "bureaucratic hurdles may make adoption of a Ukrainian child impossible". Adopting a child from another country is complicated politically, financially, culturally and emotionally. It is not for the faint of heart.

Matthew Morgan-Jones, the country director for All As One, a small non-governmental organisation that runs an orphanage in Sierra Leone, knows about those complications. He's lived them times four as single dad to David, Dauda (both seven), Magda (five) and Mariama (three). "Adoption is something that I knew I would do from an early age," says the HR manager for Emirates Computers in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. "I started researching adoption after working in South Africa and visiting a number of Aids orphanages."

Heart made up, Morgan-Jones began the year-and-a-half process to adopt his first two children, joining an adoption support group in Dubai. He started pre-parenting classes and, with the help of a social worker, began talking "through subjects around inter-country adoption: single parenting, talking to your child about adoption, different types of families, racial and cultural issues, abandonment, attachment and bonding".

Fourteen months later, Morgan-Jones was flying across Africa, his mum beside him for support, to meet Dauda and Magda and finalise the adoption in court. "People sometimes think the paperwork is daunting. But that is the easy part, as you are relatively in control of that part of the process," he says. Morgan-Jones's three-week stay in Sierra Leone turned into two months, with rains halting the court proceedings and the judge catching malaria.

Other surprises were in store: "I had this rather romantic vision in my head of what the first meeting (with the children) would be like. This was soon completely scrapped with poor two-and-a-half-year-old Dauda screaming his head off for three days, scared to be near the 'ghosts'. He had obviously not seen many white people before." Magda, at one, was more trusting, sitting up in her cot and holding up her hands to Morgan-Jones when she first saw him.

The family grew again ("I went from zero to four in two years," Morgan-Jones says) with the addition of David, Dauda's best friend in the orphanage, and Mariama, born with a cleft palate, now a smiley three-year-old. "I wouldn't have had it any other way," says Morgan-Jones. "At one point I had four children four and under and it was so crazy. But so funny, too. Now they are such a strong unit." It's a strength sometimes tested from outside. Morgan-Jones has had to get used to "constantly being looked at. You can see people looking, seeing a white guy with African kids, hearing them call him 'Papa' and doing a double take. We've gotten used to it and we even talk about it as a family, especially when people are really staring".

The stares are easier to take than the questions. Some people, Morgan-Jones has found, feel entitled to ask personal, intrusive ones. "I'll be packing the grocery bag at the supermarket and trying to keep Mariama occupied and the boys from picking up chocolate or chewing gum from the counter and suddenly the person next to me will say: 'Are you married?' 'Are these your wife's children?' Or worse: 'Where is their mother?' 'Are they real brothers and sisters?' 'Are you their real father?' I think early on in the adoption journey you realise that your child's birth history is their own to tell and not for general conversation at the supermarket counter."

Those histories are something he shares with them often and eagerly, with each child having what Morgan-Jones calls a life book ("actually, we have life photos. I still need to put them into book format") so each can understand his or her unique story. Morgan-Jones is also deeply committed to sharing the rich culture of his children's birth country. One of the "brilliant" things about Dubai, he adds, is the adoption support group, which includes many families who have adopted children from African countries. They've formed a subgroup that gets together socially every week, celebrating occasions like Sierra Leone's national day.

"Wherever we live, we always gravitate to the African community," says Morgan-Jones, adding jokingly: "If I ever want the girls' hair to look good." The election of Barack Obama was another identity moment. "Obama becoming president had our house in a party mood," he says. Morgan-Jones pointed up all the similarities between Obama's background and those of his children: "His father was from Kenya, his mother was a single mum and white, he'd lived abroad for a lot of his early years. We celebrated for a month."

No doubt, the set of African drums the family keeps in the house ("They drive me crazy on a Friday morning," says Morgan-Jones) got a lot of play. For all the celebrating, Morgan-Jones stays alert to the many issues and challenges faced by an interracial family. "I hope my children become a fusion of both their Sierra Leone and British heritage. They cannot be anything else. They will always be from Sierra Leone, adopted into a single-white-male-British family living for the majority of their lives as an expatriate family. I never forget that I'm the minority in my family. End of story."

What matters most, especially as his children are growing up and with the boys now more interested in wearing their English football shirts than their national dress ("Dauda is kind of over the African thing," admits Morgan-Jones) is that his children know this is their "forever family", that they know "they were wanted and are so, so, so loved". That is the message I want my own adopted daughter to hear as she moves into her teenage years, bumpy terrain for any family. Fourteen years ago next month, my husband and I flew from our home in Montreal to Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia. We knew only the name of our then-five-week-old daughter - Natia Merabovna Lomsianidze - and that her birth mother did not have the means to care for her. We also knew enough about the history and culture of this former Soviet republic to be excited at the prospect of a new world opening to us.

"Your daughter's roots will become your roots," a wise Georgian friend told us at the time. And they have. We can't speak Georgian - a language nearly as difficult for a westerner to learn as Arabic - but we fell in love with the Georgian landscape, with Georgian a cappella music and Georgian cuisine. I learnt how to make the country's trademark cheese bread called khachapouri and bake it for our daughter's birthday every year. Georgian art hangs on our walls.

Are these small things? Perhaps. But they have come to matter as much to us as to our daughter, who like Morgan-Jones's son Dauda is a little over the Georgian thing these days. I couldn't have predicted any of the bends along the way, certainly not the fact that a small country below Chechnya would come to mean so much. There is a great deal to consider when one takes the first tentative steps in an international adoption: Can you deal with the spools of red tape? Can you live on the roller coaster of countries opening, then closing, their doors to prospective parents from abroad? Can you wait and then wait some more? Can you accommodate a culture different than your own? Simply, is your heart large enough?

To find out more about All As One, visit www.aaodubai.org. For resources on preparing for adoption, visit www.adoptionlearningpartners.org.