Frank Jones

Frank Jones swept us off of our dirty little feet when he came to visit the orphanage. We didn’t know why he was there or who he worked for and I’m not sure we cared. He was kind, and fun and we loved him.

The year was 1977 and my sister and I had been in the orphanage in Dhaka for a few months. I think I had started to accept that I would never again see my mother. Well maybe not accept, but I knew it was true.

The orphanage wasn’t so bad. There were lice, and lots of crying, and children who had been there their entire lives but there were also three meals a day, and the promise of a better future. I only cared that my sister was with me. Back then she was my everything - both of my parents, my best friend, my siblings, and well… my whole world rolled into one small brown girl with two big front teeth. As long as she was beside me I feared everything a little less.

We rarely had visitors in the orphanage. So when Frank Jones came it was a special treat. He had brown curly hair, always carried a camera and was the happiest person I’d ever met in my young life. During that visit we went on picnics, listened to music, chewed gum for the first time and felt hope that this elusive thing called ‘getting a new family’ might not be so bad after all.

My sister especially adored him and asked him daily – ‘you be my daddy?’
Gently he would tell her no, he had lots of kids of his own already but somebody lucky would be her daddy someday soon.

Years later I learned that Frank was a reporter for the Toronto Star and that he had visited us to write a story on international adoption. The story is in the archives somewhere and I’ve meant to order it so many times just to have and show Deaglan someday. The picture he used to tell the story is of my sister wearing his Toronto Star hat with a caption that read: Will you be my daddy?
We’ve spoken once since. Frank and I. I wrote to him and he asked if he could do a follow-up story on my sister and me. At the time, my sister didn’t particularly feel like much of a success story so we declined.