Esta was here

Yesterday we had the pleasure of hosting a crowd of family members at our home. Everyone wanted to meet Esta in person. Especially because none of our youngest generation has ever met her before. It's a long time since 1975 when she was in Finland for a year as a 10-year-old schoolgirl.

Anna-Liisa retold the story of how Esta became her child. Esta's mother had been killed in an accident and her father needed desperately some help with the baby. He brought Esta to these two Finnish missionary ladies. They agreed to take the baby until he could remarry and take the baby back home. When Esta was three she was returned to her father but she had already taken Anna-Liisa as her mother. She refused to eat and was unhappy. Later when Anna-Liisa went there to meet the family Esta started to clap her hands and shout happily "Kotiin, kotiin!" There was no other way than to go to the social workers and sign the official documents. Esta was never adopted but it was agreed that she will stay with Anna-Liisa for upbringing.

It was nice to find some photos from 1987 when Tiina and I visited Tarime in Tanzania, where Anna-Liisa and Esta where living then. Esta was already married and their first son Edvin was a toddler. Our Siiri was born a year later.

Looking at the photos I must admit to some mixed feelings of nostalgia and amusement. I appear as a serious young man with a lot of good will but no sense of direction. There is a strange incompatibility between what I must have been thinking and how it appears. And the same phenomenon is and must be true even now. We tend to be blind to the things that are most obvious about us to others. And usually nobody wants to tell you what it is. Except children maybe. And so we are able to parade through our lives without ever discovering who we really are. This is a tragedy and it makes us humans pitiful and often ridiculous. But I think it also makes us lovable in God's eyes as he says: "I will not lay it to their charge for they know not what they are doing".