Maia in her hat

This is one of my favorite pictures of Maia. It comes from early May, 2004, just before we adopted her. She was then two and a half months shy of being two years old. The photo was taken outside our hotel in Almaty, Kazakhstan. You can see Maia's impish personality from this picture, and her charisma. She's a beautiful and funny child.

Maia has always loved clothes, and this was the first outfit that we got for her.

At the orphanage, she had to share clothes with other children. There was a communal laundry, and nothing was really hers. I remember the third time we went to see her, they had dressed her up in all of this finery, and she spent a longish time admiring her shoes.

When they let us take her out of the orphanage in Shymkent to visit a doctor in Almaty, they dressed her in those same shoes. I took those shoes for Maia when we brought her back to the orphanage from Almaty, along with the sturdy rubber band that had been used to put her hair up in a top knot. On the train on the way to Almaty, I had examined the rubber band and had realized that it was a cross section of a bicycle inner tube. From the markings, it looked like someone had used a razor blade to slice the inner tube in sections. I kept the band as a symbol both of the poverty of the orphanage and also of the ingenuity of its people. When she's older, it will be something for Maia to touch that came with her from the orphanage.

John, March 23, 2006

ps Thanks to Raghunath Rao for instructing me on how to post pictures.