What happens when you choose to live and work in another country, and, by fate, you meet a child with whom you and your partner establish a connection? What happens when you attempt to adopt that child in a country where there is no clear adoption program and laws for foreigners? It can blow way out of control - as Madonna found out when she got a court order that allowed her to take her son-to-be out of Malawi during the 18 month adoption process.

Or it can bring geopolitics of a region down to the most personal of all actions: building a family. And, that's the story Neely Tucker tells in Love in the Driest Season.

Love in the Driest Season is the story about how his daughter-to-be, Chipo, came into their family, but it's also the story about Tucker's life in Zimbabwe as a foreign correspondent caught both professionally and personally in the whirlwind of shifting African geopolitics. Tucker and his wife Vita move to Zimbabwe when Tucker is assigned the African post for his newspaper. They volunteer in an orphanage and watch 35 children die in 24 months. Both of them become involved in working at the orphanage and raising money to improve conditions. And then, their work becomes something more.

I recently reviewed There is No Me Without You, a moving look at AIDS and its powerful effect on Ethiopia, families, and most especially the children. As promised at the end of that review, here is my interview Melissa Fay Greene, the author of There is No Me Without You.

You recently returned from Ethiopia. You were there during Passover (April) – how do you celebrate Passover in Ethiopia? (It can be challenging enough in some parts of the US.)

We were the guests of Dr. Rick Hodes, an American-Jewish doctor who has lived in Ethiopia for about 20 years, and of his houseful of adopted and foster Ethiopian sons and long-term guests and recuperating patients and neighbors and people he met while swimming laps at the Sheraton and Israelis he lured home from the airport when his Ethiopian sons greeted arriving passengers from Tel Aviv with signs that read—in English and Hebrew—"Need a kosher seder?  Talk to us."  Jewish, Muslim, and Ethiopian Orthodox Christian guests sat together in a huge circle on the floor, around spread tablecloths and traditional foods, and we chanted through a seder in three languages.  My son Jesse, age 11, pitched forward and fell asleep on the floor in the middle of what was, essentially, the dinner table.  He was still jet-lagged. He snoozed there a while, without anyone seeming to notice, but I finally roused him enough to walk him off the table and into a back bedroom.  (I write more about Dr. Hodes in my book)

In reading material on your website I gather that you and your husband are parents to 9 children. Can you tell us how they joined your family?

We’ve been blessed with four children by birth (Molly, 25, Oberlin ’04, works for ForestEthics in San Francisco;  Seth, 22, is a senior at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music;  Lee, 19, is spending a gap year studying and volunteering in Israel;  Lily, 14, is in ninth grade, living at home with us in Atlanta); and three by adoption (Fisseha, 13, in 6th grade, came three years ago from an Ethiopian orphanage;  Jesse, 12, a 5th-grader, came seven years ago from a Bulgarian orphanage; and Helen, 10, grade 4, came five years ago also from the Ethiopian orphanage.)

Finally, Daniel, 12, and his brother Yosef, 10, currently live at the foster home in Addis Ababa which is the subject of my book There is No Me Without You.  We’re hoping to bring them home by the summer.  

In the late 1980s and early 1990s in the US, my best friend got sick. I didn't know it, though, until he told me, finally, around 1988, on a late Spring evening, in a restaurant on Capitol Hill, not far from those politicians who dared not speak the word that my friend brought up that night: He had AIDS.

I had no idea of the secrecy my friend had gone through -- at work, with his family, with his friends. The deaths - of lovers and friends - he couldn't talk about. With the secret out, we talked. And I began to notice that his other friends, men mostly, seemed to disappear. At each social event, some of them were thinner and thinner -- until we didn't see them anymore. Other friends, who weren't sick, also disappeared. They didn't want to be near the sick. My friend called AIDS "the plague". People were afraid to shake his hand, hug him. At that time, AIDS was a death sentence. It was only when and how, not if. No AIDS cocktails, no remission. It was the gay disease.

And then, after many years, the hard work of the gay community and others paid off. New drugs came out, people started living longer. Fewer people got infected; fewer children too. AIDS disappeared from the headlines. But, as There is No Me Without You proves it shouldn’t have. AIDS didn't go away.

When I saw There is No Me Without You, I was torn. I recognized the author, Melissa Fay Greene,  from her articles about adoption and large families. Still,  I walked right past this book. Twice. Yup. AIDS on the front cover? - I didn't need to read more about despair and death. I didn't want to be depressed. I didn't want to remember.