Vasco’s next chapter: God makes a family

The Wee Man isn’t so wee any more.

Vasco Sylvester, the 10-year-old boy from Malawi who Sun-Times readers helped bring to Chicago for lifesaving heart surgery this spring has grown three inches — and three shoe sizes — since he left Hope Children’s Hospital in June.

His heart is working perfectly. His strength, vocabulary, confidence and muscles grow every day. He can run and jump and swim and play soccer (he’s a striker) for the first time in his young life.

Many of you have written to me over the last three months asking about Vasco — how he is and where he is.

My family has some happy news we want to share with you.

With the cooperation of the Malawian and U.S. governments, we are in the process of adopting Vasco.

He lives with us in California, started fourth grade last month at the local grammar school, and his soccer team, the Fat Pandas, are 2-1.

Vasco is happy, healthy, flourishing and has a family who will love and care for him for the rest of his life. Looking at him slide-tackle a player twice his size or belly-ride a big wave on his surfboard, it’s hard to believe this is the same sick little boy, who lived on the streets alone after his parents died of AIDS, whom we met on the side of the road in Malawi two years ago next week.

The joy and blessing this child is in my life and the life of my family and extended circle of friends is something I don’t think I could ever adequately articulate.

Your contributions helped clothe and feed him in Malawi, and since his arrival here, have helped with doctor bills and to pay for the expensive heart medication he needs to take daily for at least another few months.

If Vasco could thank you all personally, he would. So I’ll do it for him.

My thanks to you, dear readers, in helping give Vasco — and his mom — a new life, is as deep as my heart is capable of feeling.

This mitzvah was the work of many, many hands.

And it started with a raffle ticket.

On April 29, 2006, I got a call from Tom Derdak, the director of Chicago’s Global Alliance for Africa, telling me that I’d won a two-week all-expenses-paid trip for two to East Africa. A month earlier, I had bought a handful of tickets from my former colleague Debra Pickett and forgotten about them. I’d never won anything. Not even a door prize.

So the news about the trip to Africa was a thunderbolt of good luck. Eighteen months later, while I was working on a book about the subject of grace, my husband and I decided to take that trip and added on another two weeks to see more of the African continent.

We decided to travel to Malawi to visit a charity that worked with street kids which we had been supporting for a few years. We were in Blantyre, Malawi, for less than 72 hours and met dozens of street children. The last one we met, after a long day of visiting with kids at a drop-in center, was Vasco.

I can still hear his squeaky little voice yell, “I’m coming,” in Chichewa, his native language, when we walked into the dirt compound where he lived with some extended family. I can still feel the violent pounding of his heart shaking his fragile little body — and mine — as he sat on my lap.

Before anyone told us what was wrong with him, my husband and I knew that he was gravely ill. He had a hole in his heart. He was dying.

When I wrote about him for the first time in the Sun-Times almost two years ago, three hospitals in Chicago came forward and offered to treat him pro bono if we could just get him to the States.

It took 18 months to get him here, but on April 29, 2009, Vasco arrived at O’Hare — less than 4 feet tall and 42 pounds. He had malaria, was carrying tuberculosis (though, thankfully, he is not infected himself), and had three parasites. After his doctors at Hope got rid of all his extra “baggage,” he underwent successful open-heart surgery to repair the large ventricular septal defect in his little lion’s heart on June 10.

It was the night of the surgery, while Vasco was still unconscious and on a ventilator, that my husband and I looked across his frail body and just knew.

This boy was our son.

At that moment, we decided we’d do whatever we needed to do to make sure he would always be taken care of, always have a family, always have a home and the chance to become everything that he can be.

But the choice was Vasco’s. With the help of our Malawian friend and native Chichewa speaker in Oak Park, Dr. Kamana Mbekeani, we asked him if we could have the honor of being his parents.

He said yes.

We weren’t sure if it would even be possible to adopt from Malawi. Anyone familiar with Madonna’s story of getting her son, David, and daughter, Mercy, out of Malawi knows a bit about how difficult it can be.

But doors opened. Bridges appeared. Angels came to guide us on both sides of the Atlantic.

Vasco’s surviving aunt and uncle gave their blessings for Vasco to join our family, and, as is the custom, so did the headman of his ancestral village. The U.S. government extended his visa until next August. We’re in the process of scheduling a home visit by a U.S. welfare agency, and then the three of us will travel back to Malawi for a court hearing on our adoption petition.

We’re not sure how all of that will come to pass, but we trust that God will make a way, just as we believe God brought this child into our lives.

A winning ticket. A surprise. Divine intervention. Staggering grace.

I’m a mother for the first time.

My heart is fuller than I could ever have imagined.

And Vasco’s is whole again, at last.