Thursday, October 18, 2007
Another Step Completed!!
Hooray! We have finished our homestudy meetings and are waiting for the state to review our 10 page paper on our family. This has taken, (not exagerating here), just days under 6 months!! Well, we are so glad to be to the next step. This step should be a month to three months. Then the next step is the national imigration step another one to four months and then to Ethiopia!! (that step being the longest at 4 to 8 months:)
Caleb's Post
This is caleb I love Mom! I Also love Josiah And Malachi!
And Daddy! Im Excited about my 2 siblings .
And Daddy! Im Excited about my 2 siblings .
Monday, October 15, 2007
Difficulties...
It was taking a class on international adoption and on the following week on bonding that I was struck with a hard idea. I realized that this trek we are taking into this adoption is larger than I had thought. Many things came up in these classes. Things such as the hardship to the children who will be leaving their home country, language and culture. They will come to a land where they will not fully grasp who they might have been if they had stayed. Had their parents lived, and they were able to grow up, who knows who they would have been. I mourned for them that day, and since I have mourned for them again. I realize that as they grow older and realize what they have lost they also will mourn.
Yet if we don't adopt them, will they ever be adopted by a black family? Are there enough families in Ethiopia who can adopt? Will they be able to support them if they could adopt? The reality is grim. Realistically if there were enough to adopt them, there wouldn't be so many orphans in Ethiopia (5 million according to BBC and half due to Aids in the year 2005). The average life span for an Ethiopian is only 40 years old!
How tragic that this nation is in this state and yet maybe one of the ways that we help them is by adopting the unwanted and bringing them to a place where they can have health care, where they can be educated, where they can learn to teach others. Maybe this is one way that we keep Ethiopia alive. Not the best plan, but one where Ethiopian children, those with no families to care for them, noone who wants them can find that they are wanted, that they are sought after, that they are worth sacrificing for. Possibly that this love that people and families like ours which can be shared with them, will bless their hearts and make them whole. Not the whole that I would want for them with their mom and dad in their home country, but a whole that is better than living a life as an orphan that noone wants. Wondering what was wrong with them that they couldn't be adopted while others are...
There are no best answers here, only help for difficult situations. That is the trek we have embarked on. Not a best situation, but help for a difficult one.
And maybe in the end they will find love.
Love to you all
So thankful to know that I am loved...
Mari
Yet if we don't adopt them, will they ever be adopted by a black family? Are there enough families in Ethiopia who can adopt? Will they be able to support them if they could adopt? The reality is grim. Realistically if there were enough to adopt them, there wouldn't be so many orphans in Ethiopia (5 million according to BBC and half due to Aids in the year 2005). The average life span for an Ethiopian is only 40 years old!
How tragic that this nation is in this state and yet maybe one of the ways that we help them is by adopting the unwanted and bringing them to a place where they can have health care, where they can be educated, where they can learn to teach others. Maybe this is one way that we keep Ethiopia alive. Not the best plan, but one where Ethiopian children, those with no families to care for them, noone who wants them can find that they are wanted, that they are sought after, that they are worth sacrificing for. Possibly that this love that people and families like ours which can be shared with them, will bless their hearts and make them whole. Not the whole that I would want for them with their mom and dad in their home country, but a whole that is better than living a life as an orphan that noone wants. Wondering what was wrong with them that they couldn't be adopted while others are...
There are no best answers here, only help for difficult situations. That is the trek we have embarked on. Not a best situation, but help for a difficult one.
And maybe in the end they will find love.
Love to you all
So thankful to know that I am loved...
Mari
Friday, October 5, 2007
Ethiopia: The Statistics
Here are some other facts about Ethiopia from a fellow blogger who has recently adopted 2 children from Ethiopia:
- One in ten children die before their first birthday
- One in six children die before their fifth birthday
- 44% of the population of Ethiopia is under 15 years old
- 60% of children in Ethiopia are stunted because of malnutrition
- The median age in Ethiopia is 18 years
- 1.5 million people are infected with AIDS (6th highest in the world)
- 720,000 children have been orphaned by AIDS alone
- Per capita, Ethiopia receives less aid than any country in Africa
- In the 90s the population (3%) grew faster than food production (2.2%)
- Drought struck the country from 2000-2002 (first year no crops, second year no seeds, third year no animals)
- Half the children in Ethiopia will never attend school. 88% will never attend secondary school.
- Coffee prices (Ethiopia’s only major export) fell 40-60% from 1998-2002.
- Ethiopia’s doctor to children ratio is 1 to 24,000.
- In 1993, after 30 long years of war, Eritrea broke from Ethiopia and became an independent nation leaving Ethiopia landlocked without any major seafaring ports.
- Ethiopia has approx. 4.3 million orphans and the country is twice the size of Texas.
Sources: Greening Ethiopia, Global Income Per Capita, CIA World Facts
Thursday, October 4, 2007
A Letter to my Family :)
Dear Family,
I was looking on a blog today and I realized that I have a lot of information about my adoption that you don’t have. My heart breaks when I see the state of events in Africa and I want to help in a small way. I know that others will help in their way and it is through all people helping in whatever way that they can, that these needs will be met. My motivation to help is because God calls us to.
(NIV) James 1:27 Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.
In addition He adopted me and gave me a tremendous love for kids and for being a mom. This has been a long transformation for me and yet I think one that God has worked for many years. Ethiopia also has been on my mind since I was a kid. You know all about this, as you also saw the TV spots and the great need there was then. I think it was then that God moved in my heart to think about helping those with less. My parents also contributed to this desire as they reminded me of how much I had. It wasn’t until visiting the Czech Republic in 1995 that I first saw real poverty, (that being greater than US poverty), in some of the outlying villages. It was hard to come back to the US after that. It was such a different view of material wealth. It was actually staggering for me as I adjusted to coming back home. The second time I saw poverty was in Morocco where there are whole villages that live over trash dumps. This was shocking for me and again coming home it was a major adjustment to the expectations of our country. However, I love my country and so I fit back in soon enough.
It was after having Caleb and Josiah, that I realized that God called me to be a mom. I receive such joy and challenge, even greater than my engineering work, that I realized that this was no second hand appointment this was my new career. Just under a year after Josiah was born, (February) Kent and I were confronted with adoption as being a possible part of our family’s plan. This took much talking and debate. Both of us realized that we had so much. We also realized that I love being a mom and that if I could love Josiah as much as Caleb, then the next child would also be provided for.
The biggest realization, though, was that we were adopted by God to be in His family. We were the kids with no Father (God) to call their own. We were the ones with nothing to offer a family (the family of God) which had much to boast of. We were the ones who weren’t safe to be brought in for the “other children” but were loved anyway and brought up to be like the Father. This above all the other reflections made Kent and I resolute that if God would provide a way we would join Him in saving at least one kid from an institution for orphans.
So a year later we were pregnant with Malachi and then I recovered and then this past February, 2007 Kent again ran across the idea of adoption. This is not to say that we totally forgot about adoption, the opposite happened. Our friends began adopting, others asked us questions about adoption. One friend adopting from the US and the next overseas. We were confronted with the conditions of orphanages in Kazakhstan where some of our friends are ministering and in Guatemala where our church visits every year. Adoption kept coming up, but for some reason, (God’s timing) I didn’t feel the time was right to start. Then in February, when Kent asked me to just listen to a radio broadcast that night, God captured my heart for a child I didn’t know.
So that night I did some research, as you all know I won’t go to the n’th degree to find something out, I like to use other people’s sources, so I did and I came across Ethiopia. Some of you have mentioned to me that Ethiopia isn’t the most needy country in Africa. If I was really doing this to help out, why not choose one of those? And with some of you I have shared my reasoning, my concerns, my fears, etc. But now I really think God was using all of that to get us to the place where we would pick the children that He chose for us.
Ethiopia isn’t the worst hit nation in Africa, but in case you don’t know where they stand. in my next blog is some info from another blog I ran across today. I think it will help fill you in on the state of things there and why I think that we are helping, in a small way, a big problem that we must do something about.
Love you guys.
Mari
I was looking on a blog today and I realized that I have a lot of information about my adoption that you don’t have. My heart breaks when I see the state of events in Africa and I want to help in a small way. I know that others will help in their way and it is through all people helping in whatever way that they can, that these needs will be met. My motivation to help is because God calls us to.
(NIV) James 1:27 Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.
In addition He adopted me and gave me a tremendous love for kids and for being a mom. This has been a long transformation for me and yet I think one that God has worked for many years. Ethiopia also has been on my mind since I was a kid. You know all about this, as you also saw the TV spots and the great need there was then. I think it was then that God moved in my heart to think about helping those with less. My parents also contributed to this desire as they reminded me of how much I had. It wasn’t until visiting the Czech Republic in 1995 that I first saw real poverty, (that being greater than US poverty), in some of the outlying villages. It was hard to come back to the US after that. It was such a different view of material wealth. It was actually staggering for me as I adjusted to coming back home. The second time I saw poverty was in Morocco where there are whole villages that live over trash dumps. This was shocking for me and again coming home it was a major adjustment to the expectations of our country. However, I love my country and so I fit back in soon enough.
It was after having Caleb and Josiah, that I realized that God called me to be a mom. I receive such joy and challenge, even greater than my engineering work, that I realized that this was no second hand appointment this was my new career. Just under a year after Josiah was born, (February) Kent and I were confronted with adoption as being a possible part of our family’s plan. This took much talking and debate. Both of us realized that we had so much. We also realized that I love being a mom and that if I could love Josiah as much as Caleb, then the next child would also be provided for.
The biggest realization, though, was that we were adopted by God to be in His family. We were the kids with no Father (God) to call their own. We were the ones with nothing to offer a family (the family of God) which had much to boast of. We were the ones who weren’t safe to be brought in for the “other children” but were loved anyway and brought up to be like the Father. This above all the other reflections made Kent and I resolute that if God would provide a way we would join Him in saving at least one kid from an institution for orphans.
So a year later we were pregnant with Malachi and then I recovered and then this past February, 2007 Kent again ran across the idea of adoption. This is not to say that we totally forgot about adoption, the opposite happened. Our friends began adopting, others asked us questions about adoption. One friend adopting from the US and the next overseas. We were confronted with the conditions of orphanages in Kazakhstan where some of our friends are ministering and in Guatemala where our church visits every year. Adoption kept coming up, but for some reason, (God’s timing) I didn’t feel the time was right to start. Then in February, when Kent asked me to just listen to a radio broadcast that night, God captured my heart for a child I didn’t know.
So that night I did some research, as you all know I won’t go to the n’th degree to find something out, I like to use other people’s sources, so I did and I came across Ethiopia. Some of you have mentioned to me that Ethiopia isn’t the most needy country in Africa. If I was really doing this to help out, why not choose one of those? And with some of you I have shared my reasoning, my concerns, my fears, etc. But now I really think God was using all of that to get us to the place where we would pick the children that He chose for us.
Ethiopia isn’t the worst hit nation in Africa, but in case you don’t know where they stand. in my next blog is some info from another blog I ran across today. I think it will help fill you in on the state of things there and why I think that we are helping, in a small way, a big problem that we must do something about.
Love you guys.
Mari
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