Alison Aucoin’s journey to adopt and parent a child from Ethiopia requires her to accept the consequences, good and bad, of the destruction of her life in New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. Through this experience, she questions what it means to be a woman and a mother without being a wife. She now confronts subtle and overt racism in the South as a white mother with an African daughter. Uprooted from the place of her birth, Alison strives to develop a multi-faceted definition of “home.”

Alison Aucoin and I have been collaborating on this project since April 2007, a year and a half before we traveled together to Ethiopia for Alison to adopt her daughter Ella Edelawit. Together, we have amassed thousands of photographs and dozens of hours of digital audio recordings. This project is a work in progress.