ABOVE: The Romeos and their extended family in Ethiopia last summer.

Last summer, my family spent three weeks in Ethiopia. In the remote region of Gondar, we visited the Sisters of Charity mission where our daughter, Asha, had spent the first six months of her life.

There, in front of the whitewashed building where 20 orphaned babies lived, was a beautiful rose garden. “Look, Mom!” Asha said. “This must be where I got my middle name!”

Asha Rose’s middle name, in fact, had come from my husband’s Italian grandmother, an immigrant to the U.S. It seemed an appropriate name for the beautiful baby with the soft ringlets whom we had adopted more than a decade earlier.

Rick and I met as undergraduates at Northwestern University, then earned advanced degrees at Ohio State before moving to Colorado with our children, Lia and Nick. Rick had a successful law practice, and I taught music and played the violin in the local symphony. Life was good.

That’s when we decided to share our good fortune by adopting one of the millions of orphaned children in Ethiopia.

It was 14 months before Asha came to us, an exotic little creature with a delicate face and huge eyes. Rick and I instantly fell in love with her. Nick proudly carried his new sister around on his shoulders, and Lia snuggled and read books with her.

After Lia and Nick went off to college, we began to think that Asha needed a little brother. “She’s energetic and bright and funny,” I told our adoption agent, Carol. “We need a boy who can keep up.”

Dante Seifu arrived three years later—tiny, malnourished, but bright-eyed and seemingly wise for his years after living on the streets of Addis Ababa. We had been told at the time that he was three years old; later, we learned that he was really five. He kept our household in a constant but happy state of disruption.

At a reunion of adoptive parents, Carol spoke to the group about the difficulties of finding homes for teens. It wasn’t long before I was on the phone, asking if she had any teenaged girls.

“Teens are a whole different kettle of fish,” she told me. “You’ll really want to think about this.”

We thought about it for a day.

Carol sent us a photo of a beautiful child with the oldest eyes we had ever seen. Her hair had been shaved off. We felt tremendous compassion and some trepidation.

A year later she arrived, a shy girl with a difficult history. I held Tadu’s hand everywhere we went for the first month, and she would come into my room each night and fall asleep curled up next to me.

As Tadu learned English, bits of information began to slip out. Her family had 100 goats, she said proudly. Her father drove a truck. She had been frightened of Americans; her oldest sister had told her that they might pour hot oil on her.

Tadu had a 10-year-old sister back in Addis Ababa, ill and bedridden, and eventually we realized we couldn’t leave her behind. It took us 17 months to get Yenu. She had never attended school and was severely hard of hearing, but she gave hugs generously and smiled radiantly at her new family.

We all traveled to Ethiopia last June. It was a joy to visit Tadu and Yenu’s extended family. Dante Seifu and Nick played soccer in the streets with the local boys. Lia and Asha painted the nails of all the little girls in the orphanage.

And because we wanted to give something back to the country that had given us four children, we had raised $7,500 to build a clean-water well in Ethiopia through the organization Charity Water.

Today, Asha is the all-American kid, a good student and great at sports. Dante Seifu is 12—tall, handsome, and bright, although he struggles with school. His years on the streets will no doubt affect him for life.

We are proud of Tadu, who has graduated from high school and now lives and works in Denver. Yenu, funny and loving, is working to become literate in English.

We are older than most of the other parents we know, and our family is more colorful, but these are not the things we think about. We want our kids to be happy and well-educated. We want them to have every opportunity our country affords its children. We want them to someday be able to help someone else in the world, just as we were lucky enough to find and help them.

Karen Williams Romeo ’80 M Mus, ’96 PHD and Rick Romeo ’80 M Mus, ’84 JD live in Boulder, Colo.

This essay was originally published in Ohio State Alumni Magazine.