Interview With Melissa Fay Greene

Melissa Fay Greene, author of There Is No Me Without You: One Woman’s Odyssey to Rescue Africa’s Children graciously took time from her book tour to chat with me about her book. I will be sharing this interview in two parts.
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Part 1

Mary: Melissa, what made you first realize that you needed to write this book?

Melissa: I humbly felt I was NOT the person to write this book; I felt that for a long time.

Today, whenever someone asks, “What gave you the background to do this?” I reply: “Because I live two miles from CDC and I carpool to soccer practices with epidemiologists. And because I know how to pronounce ‘epidemiologists.’”

In short, I begin by half-apologizing that I am but a “generalist,” not a doctor, demographer, social scientist, or other health care professional.

That sheepish sort of reply got me into trouble in August, when the Decatur Book Festival of nearby Decatur, Georgia, printed my quote as a headline, beside my author photo: “’I know absolutely nothing about this subject!’ Greene says.”

Since then I’ve been more cautious.

As a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine, I was commissioned in 2001 by the editors to write a story about AIDS orphans in Ethiopia [12/22/02] and there was a terrific response from across the country.

Before I knew it, I had been invited to steer about $75,000 in charitable donations to a cause of my choice in Ethiopia.

I chose trying to save the children I’d met at a home for HIV-positive orphans in Addis Ababa (then called ENAT, now called AHOPE). I approached a friend, Dr. Jane Aronson, head of World Wide Orphans [WWO], crying, “The orphanage is nothing but a hospice! They’re all going to die.”

“Do you want me to go into Ethiopia?” she asked.

“Yes, that’s what I want,” I said.

The result was WWO’s free pediatric AIDS clinic for orphans, the Barlow Clinic. [see www.wwo.org for more information] Not all—but some of the children I met in November 2001 on my first trip to Ethiopia have been saved by the Barlow Clinic.

So it was really the response to the NYTimes article—the donations, the many invitations to speak (including invitations to speak to actual epidemiologists and to global finance people) that gave me the feeling: “Well, someone ought to be covering this story full-time, in a big way. Maybe it can be me.”

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Mary: When you think of the time you spent in Ethiopia researching this book, what scene most often comes to your mind?

Melissa: Great question! I think of my first night with my daughter Helen. She was five. She had lost her mother just a few months before I showed up at the orphanage run by Adoption Advocates International and was introduced to the child as her mother.

We stayed at AAI’s Guest House.

All day together, Helen had been collecting bottle-caps. She dug them out of the dirt under the table in the Italian restaurant we had enjoyed an outdoor lunch. She found them on the grounds of the National Museum. Alone together for the first time in our little apartment, we were quiet together. I knew no Amharic. She seemed to know no English. (She was faking. She knew tons of English. She could speak, read, and write English. But she felt too shy for the first few weeks to reveal the extent of her education.)

I pretended to prepare an Ethiopian dinner by reheating the various wats, spicy stews, left for us by the housekeeper.

She busied herself washing the bottlecaps in the bathroom sink. She climbed up on a shelf, reaching for a wooden candlestick. I ran over and got it down for her.

Then she came, shyly and prettily, and took my hand, drawing me into the livingroom. She bade me be seated on the floor.

She had filled the candlestick with water. Now she elegantly poured out the water into the polished and shiny bottlecaps; with two hands, she presented a bottle-cap full of water to me.

I took it with two hands, bowing in gratitude.

She had prepared the traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony for us.

I sipped from my bottle-cap of water.

The sweetest sip of my life.

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(Part 2 coming tomorrow)

Next stops on book tour: Portland & Seattle.

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