A Day in the Life of a Gladney Intern

If I’m going to be completely honest, I didn’t even try to smile for this photograph. I was tired, dirty, probably hungry, probably in pain, and definitely heartbroken that this was my last day with these kiddos. While it’s important to insert boundaries into the relationships you make with kids you see once a year for a week in July, and to actively assess your (and their) attachment levels to one another, there’s no limit to the amount of love you can give. I’m actually having a very difficult time trying to condense Colombia into a blog post. How do you put four years of San Mauricio into about 900 words? (Spoiler Alert: you don’t). So instead of trying to talk about La Fundación San Mauricio as a whole, I’m just going to tell you a couple stories. My first story is about the very first five minutes I ever spent at San Mauricio. I was 16 years old, and still exhausted from an extremely long trip to Bogotá ( think: pilots locking themselves out of the cockpit, mech...

In the past four days I’ve probably been asked about a hundred times, “Is it what you expected?” The thing is, when you work in adoption, you don’t go into anything with expectations. When I reported for work on my first day, I knew I was going to be doing, and I quote, “adoption-related work.” So the only expectation I had on the first day of work was to be doing something related, in some way, to adoption. [ Insert 549 page Colombian adoption manual. Entirely, 100% written en Español. ] About 15 minutes into the day, before I even learn where the bathroom is, my supervisor, Beth Whitacre (the Intercountry Adoption Caseworker) sits me down with this HUGE manual of annexes, divided into two parts, and explains that the Colombians just recently changed the law and I need to update the templates. In my head I’m thinking, “Ay dios mío, tengo que traducir toda la ley de adopción de Colombia?” Thankfully my work was kept to about 30 pages, give or take. I...