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Ankeny dad's mission: Adopt orphan from Malawi

Steve Nielsen of Ankeny will be riding waves of mixed emotions today.

He will hear a new voice on this Father's Day mingling at home with wife Lisa, son John and daughter Rachel.

That voice will belong to a 6-year-old girl who has joined his family. An orphan for almost all of her life, Eletina Tsogolani, formerly of Malawi in Africa, will legally become his adopted daughter by year's end, if all goes according to plan.

At the same time another voice will be missing. That of his dad, Carl Nielsen of Altoona. He died at the age of 78 in April, but lived long enough to know that he had helped his son answer the call to make a difference in the life of a child.

"Yes, it will be my first Father's Day without my father," Steve Nielsen, 47, said. "But out of that pain there is this joy of Eletina in our lives."

Nielsen remains in awe that a little girl from such a distant place has become part of his family's 2011 Father's Day story.

"When you think about what it took for all these pieces to fall into the puzzle, it is amazing," Nielsen said.

Yes, he had signed up for the Ankeny First United Methodist Church's July 2010 mission trip to the Republic of Malawi, one of the world's poorest nations.

And, yes, it did strike him as odd that he had chosen to go that far away.

"We had a group that had gone there in 2009, and they came back with incredible stories," he said. "But I really didn't know why I was going. There are mission trips a heck of a lot closer than a 19-hour flight to Malawi."

Still, as he saw it, he would go on the mission, work alongside his fellow church members, and return to Iowa to his family and his job as general counsel for a company that wholesales farm supplies.

Then came the call. Nielsen was one of 11 Iowans who were visiting an orphan center.

"It wasn't an orphanage because they can't house the kids," Nielsen said. "But they open the center at 8 in the morning to make porridge, and there are about 90 orphans who come every day, 365 days a year."

One of them was Eletina Tsogolani, who was 5 at the time. Born with a club foot, she was left without parents before she was 3 years old, Nielsen was told later.

When her father saw that club foot, he told her mother, "Throw that child away. She's defective," the local Malawian pastor, Steve Mbewe, told the Americans.

The mother refused her husband's request. The father left.

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