Our trip was AMAZING! Maybe one day I'll have time to say a little more about it but for now I'm just going to post pictures from our trip and blog about our 1st meeting with A. Thank you to everyone who has prayed for us during this process, please continue to pray as we wait to get the final documents and get the final call to bring her home!
Our first meeting with A was good. We waited outside while our guide went into the orphange and told them who we were there to see. Next thing we knew we were being ushered into livingroom of the orphanage. My good friend Mandie so blessed us by videoing our first meeting with A. When I walked in I saw her sitting on floor playing with some toys. Everything in me wanted to run over pick her up and love on her. But we have had the last 7 months to memeorize her face and long for the day when we get to meet her. For her we are just another set of faces (staring and making goofy faces at her). So we both sat on the ground next to her and stephen gave her his glasses, which she LOVED, and kept them the entire time we were there.
Finally I felt like she warmed up enough and I picked her up, she fussed a little, but then calmed down. It felt amazing to finally be holding her! I knew stephen wanted to hold her so eventually I handed her over to stephen. Well she was not too happy with this! She cried and cried but again eventaully calmed down once he gave her a lollypop=) She found stephen's beard very interesting since most of the men over there don't have facial hair. We had about 2 hours with her the first day and it was perfect, when it was time to go she was tired and ready for a nap.
In all we got to spend 4 days with her!
The last day was terrible. She had really warmed up to us and came kept reaching for me. I was able to feed her a snack and her lunch. Midway through Lunch Abel our guide showed up and we knew it was time to go....
I stood up and hugged her and told her how much we loved her. She's a snuggle bug so she enjoyed snuggling with me and I just lost it. I couldn't keep back the tears. Eventually I handed her over to one of the nannys and walked away. I couldn't look back..... I walked outside and mandie was standing there and she hugged me and I cried and cried and cried. It was so hard! Most of the trip we all were joking and having a good time but this day our hearts were so heavy that we did very little talking. The call to come back and get her can't come soon enough!
We were also able to visit Yezelalem Minch, the ministry run by Birtukan and Nesibu (the guesthouse owners). What an amazing ministry. We knew alot about this ministry before we came but we were so humbled by the passion they have for the orphan children in Ethiopia. On saturday we got to help out with the feeding program for the children.
The last day was hard knowing that we were leaving and didn't know when we would be back and exciting because we were going to be able to see our kids back in the states. Stephen talked me into getting my hair braided a few hours before we left. We had an amazing group of people we traveled with and we had such a good time!
No comments:
Post a Comment