beautiful child

I spent some time trying to decide what to name this blog. I've settled on this: bareedduu mucca. It means "beautiful child" in Oromo, one of the languages (although not the main one, that is Amharic) spoken in Ethiopia. Now with my limited understanding, I know that "bareedduu" means beautiful, and "mucca" means child, but I'm not sure if I can actually put those two together to make the phrase. For all my purposes, however, I can, and I did.

So here we are, just one day before Keely and I are off to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for seven weeks. We must start off with crediting Janet Fink with Superkids and all those working with the Ethiopian Adoption Program at Gladney Center for Adoption. Even more information about these amazing programs can be found here. These people believe in what they do and in making a difference in the lives of orphans around the world. Amazing stuff.

Keely and I will be working in different orphanages around the Addis area not only with the disabled kids, but teaching the caregivers how to best handle these children with special needs to promote their optimal development. We'll be doing physical therapy interventions, but also offering the love and attention that many of these orphans don't receive. Although electricity and internet are unreliable (at best, it appears) in Addis, we're planning to keep daily entries and update this blog as we can. We hope to both entertain and enlighten people about what we're doing and what we're seeing. We know this will be a life changing experience and we are so excited to have this opportunity.

Well here we are, 100 pounds of toys later and just a few items of clothing in our bags, and we're off to Addis!