To Addis and back (Part 5) Donations

Happy 10 month Birthday, Charlie!

Before I start his post I'd just like to thank the AP community (and others) who posted comments on the last thread regarding Charlie's *separation anxiety*. I found them truly helpful. And the fact that EVERY SINGLE comment gave the same suggestions made for a powerful and persuasive lobby. I had, of course, read all about attachment parenting, and knew in theory what to do... but in real life, with Charlie here in front of me and the theories not... plus being swayed by parental advice (even though they are great parents they have never parented an adoptive child as many of you pointed out)... Well I needed you readers and forum members to remind me of the months of studying I had done previously to bringing Charlie home. So I went back to 100% being there for her and not trying to sneak out the room for a bathroom break or whatnot. Although my back is killing me (spasms), she had a much more pleasant afternoon and evening and I did too. She didn't cry AT ALL (because I never left her side) and laughed and played a lot more than she had been. So thank you all for taking the time to respond. Back to the trip journal:

DONATIONS:

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We brought 4 suitcases of donations for various orphanages. My belief was that my agency care center most likely did not need all 4 suitcases, as every few weeks a new influx of American parents arrive with donations, and I was right. The day we visited her care center, there was a whole courtyard full of suitcases filled to the brim. They are well supplied with diapers, formula, clothing, shoes, medications, etc.

So instead of leaving all 4 with the IAG care center, I did some research ahead of time and my mom asked her Ethiopian friend to do some research as well. We came up with AHOPE

and Mary Joy Aid Through Development as needy organizations that do awesome work.



Each place got a suitcase full of kid's clothes, medications, and jewelry (the edible candy type!) Even the boys enjoyed the candy bracelets! Here are some pictures.


I was not able to go to the orphanages, and deeply regret that. I needed to stay with Charlie, as this was the day she was dropped off at the Guest House. There was no way I was leaving her after waiting all these months to meet her, and she was traumatized and needed to stay put. I know in a general sense what these orphanages are like, having been to several in the past, and worked at one in Bolivia for a summer. Still, I felt sorry I could not go to these, but we can't always go to everything we want to in life. Luckily my mother could go in my stead., She was especially impressed with MJATD, which is not an orphanage, but does outreach in the community regarding HIV/AIDS education and does aid HIV positive kids (just doesn't adopt them out) through community programs. It was started by a Sister named Zebider Zewdie. My mother was very impressed with that program. The website is www.maryjoyusa.org or www.maryjoyethiopia.org

Why Ethiopia (part 2)

Ethiopia's orphans face life of hardship

by Jonathan Clayton

The Ethiopian peasant farmer and his wife shuffled painfully into the orphanage. They were in the last stages of Aids and had only weeks to live. However, they were happy. They had heard the Franciscan nuns had found a home for their three children and had come to say farewell.

“I am so happy, they are going to stay together,” the father, Solomon, whispered as he embraced a middle-aged Mormon couple from Salt Lake City, Utah. “Now, I can die peacefully. They will go to school in America and have a future. It is good they leave here.” As they embraced their two daughters, aged 8 and 6, for the last time the tears ran freely. Their four-year-old son did not appreciate the significance of the moment and ran off to play with friends.

Sister Luthgarder, a seasoned veteran of such heart-rending adoptions, explained: “It is sad, but it is so rare they are kept together and so I am happy.” Only a week previously a brother and sister were separated: one going to Norway, the other to Canada. “The new parents said they would take them to see each other every year, but inevitably they will grow apart,” she said.
Only a fraction of Ethiopia’s burgeoning population of orphaned children, now put at five million, find their way to Kidane Meheret Children’s Home. Even fewer leave and they are certainly the lucky ones.

A few miles away, dozens of children sleep in drains at night and beg by day at the sprawling central bus station. They face constant dangers.

“Some are forced into prostitution, some are sold by relatives after their parents die, they are kept as maids and often abused,” said Dagmawi Alemayeau who runs an organisation, Forum on Street Children, which tries to fight trafficking. Most of an estimated 50,000 children on the streets of the capital, Addis Ababa, at some stage pass through the bus station where he has his office.

“Traffickers go to the rural areas ... there are places where you can even buy a baby for as little as $1,” he told The Times. He always keeps an eye open at the international airport where so-called “uncles” can often be spotted boarded planes to Gulf states with teenage girls.
Across the rest of Africa, a combination of soaring populations, growing poverty and the HIV-Aids epidemic has led to a huge increase in orphans.

A UNICEF report estimates that in sub-Saharan Africa alone there will be more than 20 million by 2010.

Cash-strapped governments on the world’s poorest continent are overwhelmed. They can afford only a handful of government run agencies. Despite an increase in foreign adoptions, some well-publicised like those of Madonna and Angelina Jolie, who has adopted from Ethiopia and Cambodia, only a tiny fraction of these children find new homes overseas.

Organisations like UNICEF and the UK’s Save the Children Fund are opposed to foreign adoptions, advocating instead that the children be placed in extended families or locally adopted so they grow up within his or her own cultural identity. They encourage would be parents to send money instead to help look after the children in the country of origin. But they are often accused of a head in the sand approach to the abuse the child may face and ignore the fact that by so doing they often condemn the child to a life of grinding poverty and no education.

“Adoption is sad, very sad but the whole issue is sad, a life of neglect, and abandonment, grinding poverty and abuse is sad, adoption is often the lesser evil especially as the people who come here are good and very carefully checked,” added Sister Luthgarder who finds at least one new born baby a week on her doorstep.

This point was made by Malawi’s president Bingu wa Mutharika with disarming frankness earlier this week. “I wish someone had come and taken 10,000 Malawian children because then I would know that 10,000 Malawians would have better education and opportunities,” he told The Times.

(picture from "There Is No Me Without You" of Mekdes the orphan girl)

The Sin of Our Generation

"I believe that this could very well be looked back on as the sin of our generation. I look at my parents and ask, where were they during the civil rights movement? I look at my grandparents and ask, what were they doing when the holocaust in Europe was occurring with regard to the Jews, and why didn't they speak up? And when we think of our great, great, great-grandparents, we think how could they have sat by and allowed slavery to exist? And I believe that our children and their children, 40 or 50 years from now, are going to ask me, what did you do while 40 million children became orphans in Africa?"--Rich Stearns, President of World Vision

Oh no...Mrs. Haregewoin Teferra has died.

My mom is in the middle of reading "There is No Me Without You" the book written by Melissa Fay Greene about this amazing woman, Mrs. Haregewoin Teferra. She's reading it because I'm "making" her. Because it's such an amazing book, an eye-opening, life-changing book. About this woman, Mrs. Haregewoin Teferra.

Mrs. Teferra lost her own daughter to illness, and in her time of grieving started taking in Ethiopia's orphans. Soon her small one room tin metal house was overwhelmed by dozens of children, all needing her love and attention. Then there were 40 orphans. Then 50! The book is about Mrs. Teferra, the orphans, HIV/AIDS and Ethiopia. It was a splendid book which gave me goose bumps (especially it's last chapter).

I also admired how Ms. Greene did not sugar coat the situation and there were times in the book when Mr. Teferra came off as more human than saint.

The world has lost a very special person today.

She inspired in me day dreams of opening my own care center in Ethiopia. I had day dreams of meeting her during my trip there this summer. Perhaps one day, my dreams will come true... but sadly, not of meeting her in person.

You can click on the link to be taken to Melissa Fay Greene's website and announcement.

Must read book

12-27-2008

My agency is awesome! They sent me a book today, which I had been reading about on various forums, with everyone saying it is a must read book about Ethiopia and AIDS orphans. It is called: "There Is No Me Without You: One Woman's Odyssey to Rescue Her Country's Children" by Melissa Fay Greene. I had then put it on all my various book wish lists, and now I can take it right back off my wish lists because here it is!

From Amazon reviews:
"From Booklist: The horrific numbers behind the AIDS pandemic in Africa, "the most terrible epidemic in human history," have little resonance for most people in the West: "the ridiculous numbers wash over most of us." But this searing account humanizes the statistics through heartbreaking, intimate stories of what it is like for young orphans left alone in Ethiopia. Greene's story focuses on one rescuer, Haregewoin Teferra, who has opened her home and compound in a rickety hillside neighborhood of Addis Ababa and taken in hundreds of the untouchables thrown in the streets and left at her door. She cannot turn them away. Yes, the comparisons with Mother Teresa are there, but this is no hagiography; the middle-aged Teferra is "just an average person with a little more heart." Greene tells the stories in unforgettable vignettes of loss, secrecy, panic, stigma, and, sometimes, hope, even as she documents the big picture of "the human landslide," the history and science of epidemiology and transmission, and expresses her fury at the "crimes against humanity" of the multinational drug companies whose expensive patents have denied millions access to the life-saving medicines. Just as moving are the personal stories of international adoptions in the U. S., including two Ethiopian children taken into Greene's own Atlanta family. The detail of one lost child at a time, who finds love, laughter, comfort, and connection, opens up the universal meaning of family. Hazel RochmanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "
Here is the link if you would like to buy if for yourself or someone you know:
http://www.amazon.com/There-No-Me-Without-You/dp/1596912936/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230415417&sr=8-1

If has 40 reviews, all 5 out of 5 stars.