Interesting Questions

I forgot to tell a quick story in my last post about an interesting question we got from the orphanage director the other day when we first arrived at the orphanage.  Last time around with Lucy, we didn't really face any of these odd questions from the people at the orphanage, but we did get the doozy questoin from the judge when he asked if we Americans sold orphans for body parts.  Yeah, we laughed on the inside too, but calmly told him no and that was never something we would do.  Really we just wanted to bust out laughing and tell him he was high for even thinking something like that.  But just like us, we all come into situations both at home and abroad where we confront preconcieved notions and ideas that we just have to do our best to shoot down as quickly and politely as possible.  And do it in love so that the other person doesn't feel like an idiot for asking.
So on this trip, we really hadn't run into anything like that again until we hit the orphanage and the director ended up asking us at the beginning of the interview why were adopting a second child and why we wanted three kids with Down Syndrome.  Our facilitator did his best to translate and then the fine gentleman looked back at us puzzled and asked us if the US govt somehow rewarded us for having kids with disabilities.  He wanted to know if we got extra money somehow for having these kids.  He just could not wrap his brain around the fact that some people just are ok with having kids that don't look, talk, walk, act or generally behave like typical kids.  It is always a bit sad when people ask questions like this because it actually shows more about their mindset and mentality than ours.  But you also have to just chalk it up to more ignorance than anything else.  Just another reason why our adoption cooridination organization has placed over 800 kids in the last few years with families, as this country still is so backwards in the way they think about, care for and discard children with disabilities.