Our Children's Heritage

As many of you reading this blog know, Catie has an unusually fair complexion for a child of Guatemalan ancestry. We jokingly call her "our little white baby" because she looks so different than Anthony, whose heritage is Mayan Indian, and Elli, who has more Hispanic features.

We are not the only ones to notice. In fact, Catie has attracted quite a bit of attention here. On our first full day in Guatemala City, a group of three teenagers at Pollo Campero were so fascinated with her that one of them snapped photos of Catie with her cell-phone camera. The girl may have done so because Catie is so cute, but Dad thinks it's because people here don't see many white children. Then on embassy day, our lawyer's daughter looked at Catie, looked at Kimberly and said, "She looks like you."

And yesterday, when all of us returned to the store where I met the woman who knows people in Guatemala, she didn't realize that Catie was from here. She told Dad that she thought we had just adopted Anthony and Elli from Guatemala and that Catie was just "a white American baby."

Kimberly broached that subject again today with Hector, our English-speaking tour guide, and he told us that some of the villages in the eastern part of Guatemala are home to people who are white. He offered to do some research on Catie's birthplace if we contact him after we get home. You can bet we will -- and we hope he will be able to help us learn more about Anthony and Elli's birthplaces, too. We are very excited about learning more about our children's heritage.