If you’re stuck in the middle of the Ethiopian court closure and your adoption progress has recently reached a standstill, then you’re probably looking for ways to pass the time (BESIDES obsessing over all the message boards..come on, you know you were). During our adoption this was one of the many hurdles we faced, and I whined my way through this and every other one, so know that you’re not alone (even if your family and friends don’t get it). Soon enough, your child will be in your arms forever and ever and all this waiting will be just a memory. So, instead of whining and waiting, how about doing something positive? Something to help the kids who won’t be going home to loving families.
During this time in our adoption, we came up with the idea to try and raise money from family and friends in an attempt to do something to help in Ethiopia once we arrived. We weren’t really sure what we’d do, we had no idea how much money we’d raise and we’d never done anything like this before, but we were waiting out the court closure and figured our holiday card mailing could be when we sent the requests–we were already sending cards (with very cool pictures of our dogs in beautiful mountain settings that no one in our family ever seemed to appreciate…”Enough with the dogs!” they’d say, but we love our furry babies! What can you do?) and we could just replace the “family newsletter” in which we had nothing to write anyway (“This year we filed lots of paperwork and did lots of waiting then got our fingerprints done again before waiting some more and…”). We gathered statistics from the internet and wrote a letter about what led us to adoption (everyone wanted to know anyway, better to throw it out there than let them wonder!), about Ethiopia’s orphans and about how we hoped to help the kids who would be left behind–the kids we knew would break our hearts when we got there. We promised hugs and kisses from our future child and photos from our trip in return.
What happened next was nothing short of amazing–our families and friends came out in droves to support our ideas (even though we still didn’t know what they were), they passed the letters on to others and asked for their support, they donated money in people’s names as holiday gifts and wrote more letters about what we were trying to do, about why this made them happy. They shipped boxes of donations and Christmas cards with checks. Then we heard from our adoption agency that the group that oversees our future child’s current orphanage was in dire need of a new orphanage for HIV+ children, and that they were trying to raise money to make it happen. We suddenly had our idea! We knew where the money would go. We frantically wrote another letter to all of our friends and family to tell them what they had contributed to–a new orphanage. Everyone was so excited and suddenly we were all in this adoption together. My hometown paper wrote a story on us, the town where we currently live wrote a feature story on us, and soon, soon we were off to Addis Ababa to meet our daughter.
We each brought a small carryon sized suitcase, plus a regular sized suitcase for Amelie (diapers take up lots of room, it turns out!) and the rest of our baggage allowance was donations. We sent the money over to the agency in charge of raising the money (along with a 100% match from my husband’s employer, Abbott Labs!). My husband later won an award from his employer for this project (The 2008 Caring Award) and it was presented to him at a large company-wide event. The event resulted in even more donations. Now, a year and a half later, ground has been broken at the new orphanage, and walls are up. Ethiopian Orphan Relief, the non-profit I founded to continue helping the kids left behind, is currently raising money for a playground at the facility. Talk about your full circle moments.
Doesn’t that sound more fun than waiting?! If you don’t want to write your own letter, send me an email to Danielle@ethiopianorphanrelief.org and I’ll send you a sample to get you started. In addition to the Toukoul Playground, EOR is also currently raising money for a Playground at AHOPE*, a sanitation system for the Hope for Hossanna School and a building for Children’s Heaven.
-Danielle
*Note: EOR was originally raising money for a water filtration system at AHOPE, but we were recently informed that another group was already raising money for this in Ethiopia, so the AHOPE staff asked that we instead raise money for a playground at AHOPE.
