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Photo Mary Ann Bragg
Xia (left), Mariko (center) and Katelin Maxwell with a photo of their newly adopted 9-year-old sister they will bring home from Ethiopia next week. |
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Photo Mary Ann Bragg
Mariko (left) and Xia Maxwell sell a glass of lemonade to New Yorker Donna Barkman on Commercial Street. |
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‘LemonAID’ sales prelude to new adoption
By Mary Ann Bragg & Kaimi Rose Lum
Banner Staff
PROVINCETOWN — You’ve seen them on the streets, and surely heard them. The Maxwell sisters with their red wagon, selling a nice cool drink on a sweltering day. Lemonade for sale: fifty cents.
The smallest retailer, six-year-old Xia, wears red glasses and is always shushed by an older sister. Nine-year-old Mariko, the blonde, speaks for the group. Katelin, 13, tall and composed, keeps control over the whole shebang.
These three girls, plus their older sister Krista, 25, are getting a new sister next week. They will travel (except for Xia) to Ethiopia with their mother, Christine Maxwell, to an orphanage to pick up Samraiweit Maxwell, who is nine and newly adopted into the family. The proceeds from the sale of the lemonade, which totals around $1,100 to date, will be given to the orphanage where Samraiweit lives, and also used to buy pens and paper and other items to give out to children the girls meet on the street.
The goal for August is to raise $2,000, Katelin says, and on a muggy Saturday the girls are headed from the West End, where their mother works, to the plaza in front of Town Hall. Their wagon is nearly dwarfed with the lemonade container, which sloshes full with ice cubes. A hand-written poster says “LemonAID” to capture the fact that orphanages in Ethiopia are mostly for children with AIDS, or children whose parents have died of AIDS.
“Feel free to ask questions,” a sign on the wagon says.
This all started last December with a trip to Africa that Christine Maxwell made with the three oldest girls, along with Maxwell’s best friend and her best friend’s husband, who is Ethiopian. Maxwell, a single mother, owns a summer jet ski rental business in Provincetown and lives off-season in Glastonbury, Conn., which is where the girls attend school.
During the three-week visit to Ethiopia last Christmas, the family worked in orphanages and stayed in low-budget accommodations, which Maxwell said she particularly chose to not appear above the standard of living there. “It was distressing to see,” Maxwell said of U.N. officials staying at higher-priced hotels. The family took a nine-hour road trip to southern Ethiopia, and Maxwell and the girls said they were particularly affected by the poverty and poor health and living conditions of the children. Katelin describes a gruel resembling Playdough that was used as a stomach-filler.
During the trip, though, at one of the orphanages in the capital, Addis Ababa, Maxwell and the girls met Samraiweit. Her parents had died, and then her grandmother was jailed, Maxwell said, for making negative comments about the government, and other relatives were unable to provide care for her. The girls describe Samraiweit as well mannered, smart and having good handwriting. She doesn’t speak much English, and when she’s home in Connecticut she’ll enter fourth grade, a year behind Mariko. “I’m not going to make anything better,” Maxwell said. “There’s a million [children] out there. It will make her life better, and it will add to our life.”
Maxwell also adopted Krista from the West Indies, Katelin from Thailand and Xia from China. Mariko is Maxwell’s biological daughter.
Back on the streets in Provincetown, the girls attract the attention of two women who ask for two glasses of lemonade, and give them extra money over the $1 owed. Another woman, a biker from New York who is sweating heavily, buys a glass of lemonade as well. Katelin holds open the photo album that they carry on the wagon, with pictures of Samraiweit at the orphanage. They’ve talked to her once on the phone, Mariko says, and they say Samraiweit may not know for sure they’re arriving next weekend.
The Maxwell family will stay in Addis Ababa for 10 days this time. They’ve learned not to bring pastries (it makes the children sick), to bring money and plan to give away the entire contents of their backpacks.
After spending a day with physicians, Samraiweit will be in Provincetown for Labor Day weekend.
mabragg@provincetownbanner.com
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