Hi everyone!
This blog will help to document our journey towards Ethiopia to adopt our second child, a daughter! We are just starting the process now, but the entire program only takes about 6 months to complete, so we expect to travel sometime in November/December to pick up our baby girl! Evan will be coming with us, and while we're not looking forward to the 30 hour flight with a 2 year old, we are very excited about being able to experience the country as a family. We are REALLY excited about both the journey and the addition of a new little munchkin to our family. Our experience with Evan was, overall, fantastic, but he was older than we had expected our child to be at placement. This time we are requesting a girl under 6 months of age, so we really will get that "baby" experience. I'm already out of control with the little girl clothes... I can't wait!
So, even though we're at the beginning of this relatively short process, we are starting to get questions from the peanut gallery. The most common of these (as with any foreign adoption) is "Why Ethiopia?" The reasons are complicated and many. With any adoption there are a multitude of risks, and a foreign adoption is no exception. Each country has its own criteria of the types of families it will consider adopting its children out to, each country has its own fees, each agency has its own fees, each country has different levels of care and need, each country has different ages of children who are available and different laws about when they become legally available, and each country has its own laws about length of stay in country. Phew, that was a lot to think about!
When we first started looking at adoption as an option for #2 we were particularly interested in countries that had a DIRE need, and in this case countries who were listed as areas with the highest level of undernourishment on the planet. Haiti is the only country in the Western Hemisphere that is listed in the most critical zone, but there are many countries in the Eastern Hemisphere that are, and Ethiopia is no exception (we are too young to adopt from Haiti, by the way). FORTY-SIX PERCENT of all Ethiopians are considered undernourished. This is a huge amount of the population. In addition to that, there are estimated to be roughly 4.8 MILLION orphans in Ethiopia, and 1 out of 4 children is not expected to reach their 4th birthday. Children are orphaned for many reasons, but the most prevalent of them is extreme poverty and AIDS ravaging their communities and literally killing their parents. In addition to this, being part of the Ethiopia Adopt Yahoo group for the past 6 months has been an inspiration, to put it lightly. It is full of people who are like us and are just looking for a way to help the world while growing our families, but also a lot of people doing very extraordinary things to help these orphans. It has been a real eye opener to be a part of this community and to meet regular folks who are doing truly remarkable things. It has inspired us to move forward with this adoption!
WE ARE STOKED!
We are so happy to be able to help a young child in need, to help a community in need, and to be given the great gift of a child so that we can grow our family further. We can't wait to get to Ethiopia to see what life is like there and to meet our little girl! Please join us on this ride!
Love, Jen, Brian and Evan
