Thursday, April 30, 2009
Help Us Raise Awareness
Hey Everyone, As our family is traveling down this road to adopt through Africa, it is increasingly weighing on our hearts to help raise awareness of the huge need that Africa has. Please check out this website. https://www.mochaclub.org/mochaclub/welcome and the other links I have posted on our blog. I am daily trying to find more ways to get the message out that small things that we in the US can do, even in our challenging economy today, will make a huge impact on those in Africa and other less fortunate countries. Just look what $7 will do! We recently watched a movie about Mother Teresa and I will never forget the scene where she was sitting in what would probably be called a board meeting with those who were managing her ministry that had been growing so much, she had finally succumb to allowing management. She didn't ever want that. She believed it (her ministry) should stay simple and let God do the rest. In the scene I am referring to, everyone at the table had a bottle of water sitting in front of them. She asked someone around the table how much the bottle cost. I believe they said about $3. She said that that would enable a child to go to school for a year or a semester, then she disbanded the management group and went back to simple and as we all know, God used her mightily throughout all of her efforts. $3/$7/$10/$20/$100 can do so much and yet it is nothing to us in the US. Please search and consider how you might be able to support Africa or some other country that has so little and is so desperate for our help. And stay tuned to our blog if you are looking for more ideas of how to get involved. As I find more, I will attach their link. More than anything, please pray for those who suffer, who are homeless and those who may need a family.
Monday, April 27, 2009
A Post from the Times Online
I found this today while searching looking at another adopting families blog...
The Ethiopian peasant farmer and his wife shuffled painfully into the orphanage. They were in the last stages of Aids and had only weeks to live. However, they were happy. They had heard the Franciscan nuns had found a home for their three children and had come to say farewell.
“I am so happy, they are going to stay together,” the father, Solomon, whispered as he embraced a middle-aged Mormon couple from Salt Lake City, Utah. “Now, I can die peacefully. They will go to school in America and have a future. It is good they leave here.” As they embraced their two daughters, aged 8 and 6, for the last time the tears ran freely. Their four-year-old son did not appreciate the significance of the moment and ran off to play with friends.
Sister Luthgarder, a seasoned veteran of such heart-rending adoptions, explained: “It is sad, but it is so rare they are kept together and so I am happy.” Only a week previously a brother and sister were separated: one going to Norway, the other to Canada. “The new parents said they would take them to see each other every year, but inevitably they will grow apart,” she said.
Only a fraction of Ethiopia’s burgeoning population of orphaned children, now put at five million, find their way to Kidane Meheret Children’s Home. Even fewer leave and they are certainly the lucky ones.
A few miles away, dozens of children sleep in drains at night and beg by day at the sprawling central bus station. They face constant dangers.
“Some are forced into prostitution, some are sold by relatives after their parents die, they are kept as maids and often abused,” said Dagmawi Alemayeau who runs an organisation, Forum on Street Children, which tries to fight trafficking. Most of an estimated 50,000 children on the streets of the capital, Addis Ababa, at some stage pass through the bus station where he has his office.
“Traffickers go to the rural areas ... there are places where you can even buy a baby for as little as $1,” he told The Times. He always keeps an eye open at the international airport where so-called “uncles” can often be spotted boarded planes to Gulf states with teenage girls.
Across the rest of Africa, a combination of soaring populations, growing poverty and the HIV-Aids epidemic has led to a huge increase in orphans.
A UNICEF report estimates that in sub-Saharan Africa alone there will be more than 20 million by 2010.
Cash-strapped governments on the world’s poorest continent are overwhelmed. They can afford only a handful of government run agencies. Despite an increase in foreign adoptions, some well-publicised like those of Madonna and Angelina Jolie, who has adopted from Ethiopia and Cambodia, only a tiny fraction of these children find new homes overseas.
Organisations like UNICEF and the UK’s Save the Children Fund are opposed to foreign adoptions, advocating instead that the children be placed in extended families or locally adopted so they grow up within his or her own cultural identity.
They encourage would be parents to send money instead to help look after the children in the country of origin. But they are often accused of a head in the sand approach to the abuse the child may face and ignore the fact that by so doing they often condemn the child to a life of grinding poverty and no education.
“Adoption is sad, very sad but the whole issue is sad, a life of neglect, and abandonment, grinding poverty and abuse is sad, adoption is often the lesser evil especially as the people who come here are good and very carefully checked,” added Sister Luthgarder who finds at least one new born baby a week on her doorstep.
I am convinced that we are to do what we can for even just one....(or two!) Thank God for the opportunity to reach out to the fatherless.
The Ethiopian peasant farmer and his wife shuffled painfully into the orphanage. They were in the last stages of Aids and had only weeks to live. However, they were happy. They had heard the Franciscan nuns had found a home for their three children and had come to say farewell.
“I am so happy, they are going to stay together,” the father, Solomon, whispered as he embraced a middle-aged Mormon couple from Salt Lake City, Utah. “Now, I can die peacefully. They will go to school in America and have a future. It is good they leave here.” As they embraced their two daughters, aged 8 and 6, for the last time the tears ran freely. Their four-year-old son did not appreciate the significance of the moment and ran off to play with friends.
Sister Luthgarder, a seasoned veteran of such heart-rending adoptions, explained: “It is sad, but it is so rare they are kept together and so I am happy.” Only a week previously a brother and sister were separated: one going to Norway, the other to Canada. “The new parents said they would take them to see each other every year, but inevitably they will grow apart,” she said.
Only a fraction of Ethiopia’s burgeoning population of orphaned children, now put at five million, find their way to Kidane Meheret Children’s Home. Even fewer leave and they are certainly the lucky ones.
A few miles away, dozens of children sleep in drains at night and beg by day at the sprawling central bus station. They face constant dangers.
“Some are forced into prostitution, some are sold by relatives after their parents die, they are kept as maids and often abused,” said Dagmawi Alemayeau who runs an organisation, Forum on Street Children, which tries to fight trafficking. Most of an estimated 50,000 children on the streets of the capital, Addis Ababa, at some stage pass through the bus station where he has his office.
“Traffickers go to the rural areas ... there are places where you can even buy a baby for as little as $1,” he told The Times. He always keeps an eye open at the international airport where so-called “uncles” can often be spotted boarded planes to Gulf states with teenage girls.
Across the rest of Africa, a combination of soaring populations, growing poverty and the HIV-Aids epidemic has led to a huge increase in orphans.
A UNICEF report estimates that in sub-Saharan Africa alone there will be more than 20 million by 2010.
Cash-strapped governments on the world’s poorest continent are overwhelmed. They can afford only a handful of government run agencies. Despite an increase in foreign adoptions, some well-publicised like those of Madonna and Angelina Jolie, who has adopted from Ethiopia and Cambodia, only a tiny fraction of these children find new homes overseas.
Organisations like UNICEF and the UK’s Save the Children Fund are opposed to foreign adoptions, advocating instead that the children be placed in extended families or locally adopted so they grow up within his or her own cultural identity.
They encourage would be parents to send money instead to help look after the children in the country of origin. But they are often accused of a head in the sand approach to the abuse the child may face and ignore the fact that by so doing they often condemn the child to a life of grinding poverty and no education.
“Adoption is sad, very sad but the whole issue is sad, a life of neglect, and abandonment, grinding poverty and abuse is sad, adoption is often the lesser evil especially as the people who come here are good and very carefully checked,” added Sister Luthgarder who finds at least one new born baby a week on her doorstep.
I am convinced that we are to do what we can for even just one....(or two!) Thank God for the opportunity to reach out to the fatherless.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
1st Posting
Well, it is taking a major effort to get our blog going. It isn't too terribly hard, but does take some time. We really could have made this easier to follow if we would have started posting at the very beginning of our effort to adopt. However, since we didn't, I just have to jump right in or will never get started. I will try to fill in the gaps after I get a few posts going to announce where we currently are.
Our family has been on a journey to adopt for a couple of years. February of 2008, we entered the Ethiopia adoption program. March 19th we received our referral from America World Adoption Agency. It didn't take any time to decide to accept! He is a precious little one and we are so excited to be so close to going to get our new addition! We have prayed for this little guy for a long time. Noah has prayed for him as long as I can remember.
We received a tentative court date for May 26th. We don't have to be there, but what that means is that once we pass court, we will be given firm travel dates to go pick up our son. The court date is the part that makes our son officially ours. Currently our tentative travel dates are June 20 - 26th.
Please keep all of the details in prayer for us so that all goes as smoothly as possible. Many do not pass through court the first or even second time for various reasons (paperwork missing, someone doesn't show to court ...etc.). That is all pretty much out of our control, but not God's so we will accept His timing!
Well, it is past time to start school with Noah, but I just had to get something going here.
Our family has been on a journey to adopt for a couple of years. February of 2008, we entered the Ethiopia adoption program. March 19th we received our referral from America World Adoption Agency. It didn't take any time to decide to accept! He is a precious little one and we are so excited to be so close to going to get our new addition! We have prayed for this little guy for a long time. Noah has prayed for him as long as I can remember.
We received a tentative court date for May 26th. We don't have to be there, but what that means is that once we pass court, we will be given firm travel dates to go pick up our son. The court date is the part that makes our son officially ours. Currently our tentative travel dates are June 20 - 26th.
Please keep all of the details in prayer for us so that all goes as smoothly as possible. Many do not pass through court the first or even second time for various reasons (paperwork missing, someone doesn't show to court ...etc.). That is all pretty much out of our control, but not God's so we will accept His timing!
Well, it is past time to start school with Noah, but I just had to get something going here.
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