Madonna is my new mum, New York here I come...
By Barbara Jones
Last updated at 10:33 PM on 13th June 2009
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This is little Mercy James, pictured in Malawi last week on the day the country’s Appeal Court agreed that she can join Madonna and her family for a new life in New York.
The four-year-old girl, whose future has been hotly debated by children’s rights campaigners worldwide, has been leading a secret existence for the past two months while Malawi’s top judges weighed up arguments for and against her adoption.
Tomorrow, according to Madonna’s lawyer, the singer or one of her close aides will arrive to collect the girl. But Mercy will have less than three weeks with her new mother before she departs for a seven-week European tour, beginning on July 4.
Hidden away: Mercy has been living a life of luxury in preparation for her possible life with Madonna
During the long wait for the court’s decision it appears Madonna left nothing to chance. Mercy has been hidden away, ready to pack instantly if the adoption went Madonna’s way.
The girl, who used to live in an orphanage, was taken to a luxury bungalow on the day in April when Madonna left the country in tears after her first attempt at adoption failed.
The house, belonging to Lois Silo, programme co-ordinator of Madonna’s charity Raising Malawi, is behind blue gates in a discreet suburb of the capital Lilongwe, called Area 47.
According to local sources, Mrs Silo and her husband have been caring for Mercy, helping her to speak English and teaching her Western manners.
Each morning she has been driven to the nearby Cherub nursery, a privately run fee-paying school. There she plays with other Malawian children who knew nothing of her special status until they heard on Friday that she was leaving the country.
Her teacher Bridget Kawiya said yesterday: ‘The staff and teachers are amazed. We had no idea this was the girl who Madonna wanted. She was registered under a different name and we knew her as Chifundo Moyo.’
Mercy's school teacher was Bridget Kawiya (in the black top)
Chifundo means Mercy in Malawi’s national language Chichewa, and she is used to being called by that name.
Mrs Kawiya said she was cheerful and intelligent, loved her schoolwork and got on well with her classmates.
Recalling Mercy’s first day, Mrs Kawiya said: ‘Many children are tearful and want to go home. But she blended straight in, playing with the others as if she had known them all her life. She’s such a sweet little girl, always happy, never crying.
‘Chifundo joined in all the games and we liked her very much in the brief two months she spent with us. She always arrived nicely dressed, happy to be with her pals.’
Mercy went to school most days with her hair in bunches, decorated with colourful ribbons. Her favourite school-bag was bright pink with a Barbie motif. Classes ended before noon and she would be taken home again where a nanny or cook made lunch for her before an afternoon nap, some children’s TV, then playtime, supper and an early night.
Mercy, a natural chatterbox, would run into school in the mornings to talk to her friends in Chichewa until corrected by teachers who encourage all the children to speak in English.
Long way away: Mercy with her uncles and her grandmother Lucy
‘That is important,’ said Mrs Kawiya. ‘English is the official language and you need it to make a good career.
'We had no idea that Mercy would need it more than the others if she is going to live in New York.
‘At our end-of-term ceremony in July we had planned that Mercy, who is so clever, would introduce herself and others from her group in French. Of course, now that isn’t going to happen. We are sorry to lose her.’
On Friday night a driver picked up Mercy from the Silos’ household and took her to Kumbali Lodge, the guesthouse where Madonna stays when in Malawi. There a Raising Malawi team from America was waiting.
Already familiar with life at the Lodge – she spent three weeks there during the first court hearing in April – Mercy tucked into supper and sought out the staff’s children who had become her friends on a previous visit.
She is expected to be flown by private jet to Johannesburg, then to New York to join Madonna’s daughter Lourdes, 12, son Rocco, eight, and David Banda, three, the Malawian orphan adopted two years ago.
Mercy’s mother Mwandida was 14 when she became pregnant by an older pupil at her school. She died days after giving birth. That left Mercy’s only relatives as her grandmother Lucy and two uncles, Peter and John. Her father James had
disappeared but claims he had been told that Mercy was also dead.
A publicity shot of Madonna with a sleeping Mercy
In spite of Mercy’s apparent happiness, charities fear she could face problems adapting to her new life.
Maxwell Matewere, of Malawi’s Eye of the Child group, said: ‘It’s hard to say how much damage may have been done to a girl who’s been moved from pillar to post because of one woman’s determination to have her.
‘Her first days were with her schoolgirl mother who then died, and she spent three years in an orphanage.
For the past two months she has been living like no other Malawian child, surrounded by toys and a bewildering array of luxury. We are pleased if she finds happiness in her new life, but we cannot approve of the stress she has already suffered.’
Others have accused Madonna of virtually bribing Malawi’s lawmakers and child protection officers into giving her what she wants by donating a reported £1.5million to the country through Raising Malawi.
But her lawyer Allan Chinula said: ‘It is a total fabrication to say that Madonna poured money into Malawi for the purposes of being able to adopt a child.’