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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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When Anna Domkins was 25, she and her husband Mark were watching a show together on TV, which ended up completely changing their lives. With their two young kids in tow, Anna and Mark moved from Wollongong to Tanzania, where three more children joined their family.
Since coming back to Australia and becoming a mother to a sixth child, Anna became the founding director of Forever Projects, which is a charity supporting Tanzanian women in poverty so that they can care for their babies and live independently. Her book is called Home Forever. Hi, Anna.
Hi, Sarah.
Tell me about you and Mark.
How did the two of you meet one another? Yeah, so Mark and I grew up in the same city in Wollongong and we met at our local church youth group. We were there on Friday nights as teenagers and our church community was a big part of both of our lives. And we met there and started hanging out and eventually fell in love and got married. And so you'd come from fairly similar families?
Yeah, very similar families. Our families were very much a part of our local community, very involved in church and community groups. And so we kind of both grew up in that similar world. Yeah.
And so church was a big part of your life. Did you ever have a period of, you know, teenage rebellion against God, Anna?
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Chapter 2: How did Anna's journey into adoption begin?
When you and Mark talked about your future back then, how did you imagine it?
Oh, we had no idea what it might become. We imagined we might have a bigger family, which we thought meant three or four children. And that's really as much as we talked. We'd never kind of dreamed of anything beyond that. So, yeah, we had no clue what our family would become.
Tell me about this documentary on TV that you and Mark watched one day. What was it?
Yeah, we watched a documentary called The Dying Rooms, which was about the conditions in some Chinese orphanages. And there were some journalists who wore hidden cameras and went into these orphanages and they'd heard that there was a dying room where they just left a child to die.
And so they wanted to go in and see if this was the case and they took these hidden cameras in and we just sat on the lounge watching this and it just broke our hearts. There was just rows and rows of babies who were never held responsible
tied to these little bamboo chairs and rocking back and forth and then there was this room where they had a child that was just left alone to die and it just shook us to the core and I think in part because we had our first baby at that time, Jackson was about six months old and he was sitting there right in front of us and the contrast between what we were seeing and what our child had was just extraordinary and so it was just one of those moments that completely changed our lives.
I mean, I think most new parents would have given their baby an extra squeeze maybe after seeing that or perhaps looked at giving a donation to a charity. What about you and Mark? What impact did it have on you, you say, right away?
Yeah, it was right at that moment that I think our idea for our family changed. We'd been in that zone where you're a new family and you're thinking about what do we want for our family? And our faith was a big part of that in terms of thinking about, well, how does what we believe impact the choices we make as a family? And we'd all heard, you know, the horror stories about people who...
do terrible things in the name of faith or of God that they don't really know. But to us, that was a big part of our lives. And so we wanted our family to reflect our faith. And so we decided at that moment that we would grow our family in part through adoption.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Anna and Mark face in the Australian adoption process?
And so I just sat down next to him and looked at the wall with him for a little while because I knew it must be so overwhelming and I thought he's probably watching the wall because the rest of the room is too much.
So I just sat with him and watched the wall and then they brought us a bottle of milk and he scooted into my lap and we just fed him and it was the most incredible thing, feeding this little baby that was obviously... and he drank that milk like his life depended on it. And he made this little purring sound as he drank.
And once again, we just, you know, Mark and I just held him and looked into those little eyes and knew we've got to give him a chance.
You also met the grandparents, Babu and Bibi, on that visit. What was that interaction like?
Yeah, it was one of those moments that you think, how can I possibly prepare for this? And they spoke Swahili and we were still learning Swahili and so it was a very kind of, it's hard to really communicate the nuances of what you want to say. But the moment we met them, they just greeted us with big hugs and we settled in to talk about their story.
They told us everything the twins and Jabari had been through And they just said, we just want a family that will keep them together. We want them to live. We want them to have a childhood. We want them to stay together. And will you take the three of them and keep them together?
So with the wishes of their grandparents, you were given approval to foster these three little ones. When the morning came to fly back to Moshi on the other side of Tanzania with the kids, how were you doing?
I just had this giant headache and I thought, of course you do. This is a big day. You're taking home three new babies and it's a lot. And then I woke up the next morning and I couldn't move and I could hear... All the kids waking up together in the house for the first time, and I couldn't even lift up my head to look at them. I thought, I've been waiting for this moment for four years.
I must be dying, and then realized pretty quickly that I had malaria. Oh. timing was just terrible. What are the chances that I get malaria the day we bring home three new babies? And so it was a rough start and Mark was incredible. He had gone from two children to five overnight and I was sick with malaria.
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Chapter 4: Why did Anna and Mark decide to move to Tanzania?
And she was developmentally ahead of where they were at. And so there was four one-year-olds, but in some ways it felt like triplets and her a little bit. But she just had all these playmates. And so she shared all her toys and she showed them what to do and she just...
loved them and there was so much laughter and so much hilarity that Mark and I were just constantly entertained sitting around watching these little people just get through their day.
So Anna, you were saying that watching the antics of these five little kids brought you and Mark a lot of laughter. But it would also have been incredibly hard work. Like the nappies. Where did you hang all of the nappies?
So we had to use cloth nappies. And at first we didn't have a washing machine. So we had four babies in cloth nappies and it was horrendous. And then we had a little twin tub washing machine. And then we had a proper washing machine, but you couldn't, in Tanzania, there's a little bug called a mango fly that lays its eggs in your skin or lays its eggs in wet clothing.
Then when you wear the clothing, those eggs go into your skin and the bug burrows down and then it hatches a life. It's like a plot of a horror movie. It really is. And so we couldn't hang the nappies outside. So we had 20 nappies a day at least. And so we would hang them all over the house. There was kind of metal bars across our windows for security.
And so everywhere there was just nappies drying and it looked like an orphanage. But that was just daily life and just getting through the day.
What about milk when they were little and needing milk? I mean, the nappies, disposable nappies were prohibitively expensive. What about formula and milk?
And that's one of the realities we came to understand about Tanzania and why so many babies are orphaned is because formula milk is available, but it's so expensive that it's inaccessible. And it's the equivalent of us walking into Woolies and one tin is $1,100. That's the equivalent in terms of cost of living for local people. So it's there, but you can't access it.
And so for women who die in childbirth, their baby then doesn't have a breastfeeding mother. And so for so many babies who are abandoned, it's not because they're not wanted. It's because they have no way to keep them. And hospitals in Tanzania don't provide food, including formula for babies. So there's no way to access nutrition for a baby who doesn't have a breastfeeding mother.
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