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Madonna - being fabulous - discussing Lola's Material Girl fashion line.
Launches at Macy's on August 3rd.
Thank you.
Earlier this week, after a month-long sojourn in Malawi, my family arrived home in California with our newly-adopted son, Vasco Fitzmaurice Mark David Possley.
His adoption would not have been possible without you and the bold actions you took in Malawi last year when its High Court denied you the adoption of your precious daughter, Chifundo "Mercy" James.
You didn't take no for an answer.
You didn't buy their argument that allowing your adoption of Mercy would encourage human trafficking. You didn't agree when they said Mercy would be fine at an orphanage and without a loving family from a foreign land.
When you appealed that myopic ruling and then won approval of Mercy's adoption from the Malawi court of appeals, you effectively made case law that kicked open the door for other American families to adopt some of the 1 million children orphaned by HIV, AIDS and other diseases (including a grotesque indifference to the suffering of the most vulnerable among us).
Your actions paved the way for families to be created across thousands of miles, through forests of diplomatic red tape and seemingly unbridgeable cultural chasms.
My husband and I met Vasco in October 2007 while we were traveling in Africa on holiday. A few years earlier, we had made a donation to an organization in Blantyre that works with some of the 60,000 children who live on the streets of Malawi -- the vast majority of them, as you are well aware, AIDS orphans.
We were on the ground in Malawi for about 48 hours and spent most of our first day visiting with a few dozen teenaged boys -- "street kids," in the parlance of Malawi -- at a drop-in center in Limbe.
On our way back to the motel in Blantyre, our guide asked if we would mind making one more stop to visit a street kid that, in his words, was "just kind of special."
We drove on the road to the airport to Blantyre's rural Chileka district, clambered down a muddy embankment and saw a clutch of mud-and-waddle huts. Our guide yelled something and we heard a squeaky boy's voice shout something back -- "I'm coming!" in Chichewa, his native language.
Out came this little fellow Vasco -- tiny, skinny -- maybe 35 pounds soaking wet -- with huge eyes and a smile that would split your heart in two. He was about eight years old but was the size of a five-year-old American child.