OUR PLANS MULTIPLIED: From Nazareth

OUR PLANS MULTIPLIED

In the beginning, JD adamantly only wanted two children. I thought that four would be perfect. Once we caught God's vision of putting orphans into families, our plan was multiplied by God. We are currently blessed with 12 children; five biological, six adopted and one more waiting in Ethiopia. Our first adoption was from the U.S., the next three were from Liberia, West Africa, and our last two were from Ethiopia. We are supporting our 12th child in Ethiopia after her adoption could not pass court.

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

From Nazareth

We left Addis Ababa this morning and are in Nazareth through tomorrow and we have wi-fi! I'm sitting out by the pool freezing (yes, in Africa) to get it, but we are all excited. We had a truly remarkable day. We first went to the West Sands School. We were pretty excited to see that they have uniforms this year. We handed out spiral note-books, pencils, slim-jims and some books for the classrooms. The time at recess was spent just hugging on children that are desperate for adult attention. I am going to be able to share more pictures of the kids in the future. We were not able to feed the children the lunch we planned, due to a restriction about feeding kids only one day, but were very blessed to hear that there is a single sponsor who is going to fund the kids eating every day! That news alone brought tears to my eyes!

Our next awesome stop was a monkey haven at a resort. We bought bananas along the road and were able to feed the wild monkeys from our hands. I did slightly consider the rabies risk, but dismissed it because the whole experience was super cool!

The high-light of the day was our visit to Brooke's orphanage. We did not realize that she was never told that we were adopting her. She knew that she had adoption paperwork in the works, but was never told for sure that it was us. Since we assumed that she knew we were adopting her, we began our conversation without clarifying that information. At one point she started to cry; since our translator had taken a phone call, it was a little while before we found out that she was crying from the happiness of understanding that we were coming back for her. She was extremely excited about the gifts we brought her and profusely thanked us. We learned a lot more about her - all good things including being able to see pictures of her mom that passed away and her as a little girl. The adoption agency is allowing her to come back to the transition home with us tomorrow to say good-bye to Bella and have a bit more time with us.