Some More of the Story and Our Video

I can't believe we have now had Addis for 2 weeks. It still feels like we just got back and are just now starting to catch our breath!

That said, things are really wonderful. Addis is sleeping through the night like a champ and eating great. The girls are loving their new baby brother, I went back to work and Ellie even started pre-school for the first time on Monday! It has been a whirlwind, but everything really is going much smoother than we imagined it would at this stage. The Lord has been good to us!

Switching gears, we realize that we have not done a great job filling in everyone on the details of our trip and we really feel badly about it. It is especially hard to look at the blogs of some of the friends we traveled with and see posts out the wazzoo regarding every detail of their trip. It is not that we don't want to share or had a terrible trip, it is just the opposite. We had such an amazing trip that we don't even know where to start. Also, having 3 kids under the age of 4 tends to fill things up a bit. But enough procrastinating.

The first thing we wanted to do for all of our loyal readers was to cut our hour or so of video footage from our trip down to a crisp 5 or 6 minute video to tell most of the story. While that took longer than expected, we are thrilled to finally include it below. We are going to detail other parts of our trip in later posts, but this really gets to the good stuff - our trip South to meet the woman who found Addis and then ultimately holding him in our arms.

Before our trip, the only detail we knew about Addis was that he was found abandoned by a woman in the Sodo region and taken to a police station. We really wanted more info, so our wonderful adoption agency found the woman and arranged a meeting. We still did not know if this would just be a coffee or if she would even show up, but it proved to be so much more.

After many hours in a bumpy Land Cruiser, we arrived in Sodo and then had to back track to Arika for a last minute location change. We then followed the literal entourage of people with this woman (local town leader, three Ethiopians from our adoption agency, head of the local orphanage and a host of different translators) off the main road and down a very rough road for about 8 KM. When that road became impassible for the van, everyone piled in our Land Cruiser until the road really ended in the village of Giragouda. We then hiked back into the village for another 30 minutes where we got to see the exact spot where Addis was found.

Miracle does not do justice the Lord's providence in Addis' little life. Giragouda is about as rural Ethiopia as you get. No electricity or running water and basically a sustenance farming village of about 300 people. As we walked back, the whole village came to life. Children, mothers and fathers all ran to greet us, asking only in their regional language, "Is the baby alive?" We were overjoyed to be able to tell them the good news and were overwhelmed as we stood in a field of Teff with about 40 villagers crowding around us listening to the circumstances of Addis' first days and looking down into the tall grass he was lifted out of. Discovered by early morning grazing cows in a field about 200 yards behind the last hut in the village with his placenta and umbilical cord still attached, we were told that Addis had been left for the hyenas. He did not even cry when he was found but thankfully he was still alive.

Our trip to Giragouda and learning so much about Addis was amazing and yet we still had not gotten to the best part. When we returned to Addis Ababa two days later, we were told they would bring him to us in the morning. Neither of us could sleep that whole night and the next morning was virtually no different than sitting in the delivery room waiting for the OK to push. The moment they brought him in was surreal. To have been where he was birthed onto the ground and left for dead and to then hold this healthy but timid little boy in my arms as my own was more than I could ever put into words.

So, we hope this video will express it in a way no blog post ever could.




P.S. In case ou are wondering, the music is my brother Neal's new song. Check him out here