Continued from here.

Later that night I called my friend Sally, who's a school social worker working at another school in our county. I asked her how I could give V. the coat without offending his parents. I wondered if I should write a note explaining that I had an extra one and it wasn't a big deal to me. If I wrote such a note I'd have to have it translated as his mother only speaks Spanish.

Sally told me that a note would be useless as V's mom is illiterate in Spanish. Just give him the coat, she said. He'll be happy to have it. I give out coats at my school all the time. She also told me that V's mom didn't have a coat, either. My friend saw her walking to work the other day with just a sweatshirt on.

Then she told me about a family at the school she worked at who was probably sleeping in their car this weekend, as they'd been kicked out of the place they lived and didn't have money for a hotel. Another family was going to sleep on the kitchen floor as the only way they had to heat their house was their stove. A child had come to school wearing shorts and a t-shirt, because that's the only clothes that he had to wear.

The school that she works at serves a different population that the school my son attends - our county has very distinct socio-economic and ethnic regions. My son's school is pretty diverse both ethnically and socio-economically - we are smack-dab in the middle of our county. The northern section of this county borders Chapel Hill and tends to be mostly white and mostly well-off. The south-western part of our county, where my friend works, is mostly minority, mostly immigrants, and mostly poor - whether because the people are recent immigrants or because they're the rural poor.

Over 80% of the school my friend works at is minority, and a large portion of that minority are Mexican immigrants - many illegal. If you're illegal you don't get welfare or food stamps or subsidized rent. You probably don't know who to tell when your child doesn't have a coat for the winter.

I'm not trying to start a discussion on illegal immigration. The adoption blogs here at adoption.com are not the forum for that at all. What I would like to do with this post, however, is to draw attention to the FACT that there are probably children in your community, no matter where you live, who do not have coats this winter! Believe me when I say that until yesterday this hadn't registered with me. Seriously. Sometimes it takes someone like V. to make you see how blind you've been.

Hello! I had my head in the sand. Well, not any more.

So V. is going to get his coat on Monday, and I think I have a coat for him mom, too, although I am about 5 sizes bigger than she is. Maybe my mom (who is a skinny minny) has a coat that she can have. Or maybe I can find something at the thrift shop. And I'm going to send an e-mail out to my friends drawing their attention to the coat situation, too. Maybe we'll have a coat drive. Maybe I'll end up mentoring V. I already asked Big J if he'd like to have V. over to play and he said yes. Maybe I'll buy every coat at the thrift shop and give them to my friend Sally to take to school. I don't know. But I'll do something, that's for sure.

I don't know how this post relates to adoption, except that I feel like for months now I've been consumed with my own issues and my own family and I think this was the smack on the head that has brought me out of it. Perhaps this is related to adoption in that, although I don't think people should adopt out of altruism, I think that for many people, especially those who adopt internationally or from foster care, that does come into play. You may set out to adopt the "perfect baby" from Russia, for example (using myself as an example) and end up being enormously affected by what you see in the orphanages. Or maybe you decide to do foster-to-adopt and in your training you see the reality of the situation for a lot of the kids. It seems to me that many people who adopt are altruistic at heart. It's time for me to channel that altruism in my community.

Edited to add this: I found an organization, One Warm Coat, that helps people who want to have a coat drive. I'm going to see if I can get a local organization interested in this...