New Chairs

Yesterday we bought 2 new chairs for our dining room table.  We're one step closer to being ready for H & M to come home.

Orphan Sunday

Last Sunday was Orphan Sunday at our church.  Aaron shared a little of our adoption story as well as a heartfelt message.  The audio for the sermon along with the videos used in the service are below.

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Video #1

Hope is Fading – Orphan Sunday from Allan Rosenow on Vimeo.


Video #2



Reflection Song (played during the offering time)

Plans are made!

We have our travel plans figured out.  Yay!  I love having a plan.  We (me & Aaron, our 3 kids & Aaron's mom) fly out at 10am on December 20th, arriving  Addis Ababa, Ethiopia at 9:50pm on December 21st.  We'll be staying at a nice guest house (Ethio Comfort Guest House) along with many of the other families traveling for court from our agency.  We are going to be collecting donations and small gifts for the children at our church for the next few weeks.  Our kids are excited about playing "Santa" to the children in the orphanage while we are there over Christmas (we'll be there over Christmas time here in the US, but Christmas--or Ganna--is celebrated on Jan. 7th in Ethiopia).  We will be able to visit H & M for 2 hours each morning and then we'll take in the city during the rest of the day.  Our court date is on Thursday, December 23.  I'm hopeful that everything will go smoothly.  We will leave Ethiopia at 11:25pm on Wednesday, December 29 and return home to Wisconsin at 5:45pm on Thursday, December 30.

Your prayers for our court date, safe travel, our health and for H & M would be wonderful.  My prayer, and maybe yours too, is that H & M would be ready for this change that is about to happen in their lives, that all of us at home would be prepared for this change, and that H & M's past hurts would be healed more each day.

We will meet H & M in exactly 6 weeks from today!

AHHHHHHH!

We got our court date!  December 23rd!  We'll be in Ethiopia for Christmas with our new kids! 

We're hoping to be able to take our 3 kids along with us...we'll see if all the details work out for us.

Aaron needs to make new plans for our church's Christmas Eve service.  I know it's going to be difficult for him to not be there for one of the largest servcies of the year, but I also know he's excited to go to Ethiopia.

Ahhhh!  Where to start, where to start?!

A Little Push

Sometimes we need God to open our eyes and give us a little push.  Read the following blog entry by a woman living in Haiti right now.

http://allthingshendrick.blogspot.com/2010/10/reality-is-weighty-thing.html

Interesting article

Here's a link to an interesting article on Ethiopian Adoption that was put out by msnbc.com yesterday:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39636986/ns/health-kids_and_parenting/

 

We're still waiting to hear about our court date.  I think this is the hardest waiting we've had to do yet!

So, what are you going to do about it?

Here are a few statistics about Ethiopia that I have gathered over the past year...

• Ethiopia is about the size of Texas
• 1 in 10 children die before their first birthday
• 60% of children in Ethiopia are stunted because of malnutrition
• There are 4.6 million total orphans in Ethiopia, of which 720,000 have been orphaned by AIDS alone
• Half of the children in Ethiopia will never attend school
• Ethiopia's doctor to child ratio is 1:24,000
• Ethiopia is considered the 5th most impoverished nation in the world, with the average income $108/year

I came across the following quote and it really struck a chord with me...

Rich Stearns, President of World Vision, US said,

"I believe that this could very well be looked back on as the sin of our generation. I look at my parents and ask, where were they during the civil rights movement? I look at my grandparents and ask, what were they doing when the holocaust in Europe was occurring with regard to the Jews, and why didn't they speak up? And when we think of our great, great, great-grandparents, we think how could they have sat by and allowed slavery to exist? And I believe that our children and their children, 40 or 50 years from now, are going to ask me, what did you do while 40 million children became orphans in Africa?"