Sunday in Ethiopia - Meeting Abera's Family by Michael

The following is Michael's second journal entry... encomapssing the next 24 hours of our trip...

Sunday - August 29th

With going to bed around midnight and having been up for like 36 hours, the morning came quickly.  We had to leave the care center by 6AM for our trip to Hosanna.  We planned to get up around 5:30 and quickly get ready to leave.  However that plan was thwarted by others in the center getting up at 5AM and with the sounds in the hallways, we were woken up.  We stumbled out of bed and began to get ready for along long day ahead of us.  The shower was a tub with no curtain and a hand-held sprayer.  So I took a quick shower and Michele passed on the opportunity.  There is no heat or air conditioning in the building since it is very temperate in Addis Ababa, and it was a cool morning, so the shower was not a relaxing way to start the day.   

To show you what our room looks like, here is a video from the night that we arrived.

While waiting for Michele to get ready, I stepped out on our balcony and heard the call to prayer.  It is neat to hear in the dark calm of the morning.  We went downstairs to the dining room to eat and we were then able to meet the rest of the travel group.  Patrick, Danielle and us were the last ones to arrive, so most had already met and we were the newbies.  In addition, most of the group had all traveled together back in July, so they knew each other already.  It took us a bit to learn this fact, which made more sense because we kept wondering how they seem to know each other so well so quickly.


Waiting to board the bus pre-dawn

 

Soon we piled into the van and started on our long trip to Hosanna.  It was nice to see that our driver was the same driver that we had back in 07, always nice to see familiar faces when you are so far away from home.  We picked up the social workers at the office who served as translators for the parent meetings and started down south to Hosanna.




Our very skilled driver!



A Social Worker/Translator who accompanied us for the trip


The reason we traveled to Hosanna was to meet with the birth families.  We did this trip when we traveled to bring home Mehandis and I loved this part of the trip for two reasons.  First, the capitol city Ethiopia is a great city to see but getting outside to the countryside provides a whole new perspective of Ethiopia.  Second, the chance to meet our son's birth family is a rare thing in international adoptions and we feel lucky to have this opportunity. 

For privacy reasons, I will not say much about meeting Abera's family but just that it was a good meeting and we felt more prepared for this meeting than we did for meeting Mehandis' family.  The family meetings are always arranged to happen on Sunday's and with our arrival on Saturday night, I was actually not able to meet Abera yet before meeting the family.  With the two trip process, our agency figured that we had met our child with the first trip, therefore it was OK to arrive on Saturday and meet the family on Sunday.  Since I did not come with Michele on the first trip, I had not yet Abera.  I wished I could have met him before meeting the family but it worked out just fine. 



Waiting to meet with Abera's birth mother



Our agency does a good job of facilitating the meetings and we were able to get a couple of pictures.  After meeting the family we had an entrustment ceremony.  The entrustment ceremony is where the families pray for each other and the birth family lights a candle and hands it over to the adoptive family.  It is a surreal event.   



A Traditional Ethiopian Coffee Ceremony followed the Entrustment Ceremony



The meetings with the birth families is in Hosanna because it is a town that is near where many of the kids our agency adopts are born and that is where the satellite orphanage is located before the adoptive kids are brought to Addis Ababa.  So Abera at one month old made the same car ride as we did today.  The birth families are brought to Hosanna for the day to meet with us. 

The trip takes around 3-4 hours each way (it was a bit longer on the way home because Addis Ababa is in the mountains and our bus went much faster down on the way there than up on the way home.  We like to say that the countryside reminds us of Ireland, it is really green and hilly.  It really is a beautiful country.  Driving along the roads you can look into the distance and see numerous thatched roof houses dotting the landscape.  You can image people living in these homes for hundreds of years and their way of life really not changed over those years.  To really take the landscape in, I would really love to walk this road in the future for an hour or two.  Then we really could see the people and landscape at a pace that would be easier to take in. 

Our van is an older vehicle and it fitted with about eight rows of benches that can fit two people on one side with a single seat on the other side of the aisle.  Then all of the rows have a fold out seat, so you can sit four across.  Our bus driver is the same driver that we had three years ago, it was nice to see a familiar face.  The group was pretty quiet for the ride, there were two kids, one 2 and the other 5, who were pretty well behaved for such a long trip. 

Here is a short video that I took on the trip.

Looking out the window is an amazing scene because you see things you never see driving in the US.  There are a ton of people walking along the road, almost no one has cars outside the city.  When going city to city,  most people travel by bus, so on the road, you do not see many other vehicles at all and when you do, it is either a bus, mini-bus taxi or a mini-taxi.  The road is paved all the way to Hosanna and mostly it is countryside with about 10-15 small towns along the way.  Nothing is paved off the road, it is all packed down dirt.  All the towns have storefronts that face the road that look to be made from sheets of aluminum.

The people walking along the roads include young and old, many of them walking with donkeys who are carrying water.  In addition, donkeys are pulling carts with wood and supplies or with people in them.  The bus driver cruises past the animals on the roads and the bus horn gets a really good workout.  You can see kids as young as six by themselves pushing donkeys down the road.  There are people sitting by the side of the road and others working in the fields.  Then you see women carrying huge stacks of wood on their backs and young women and kids carrying babies on their backs.  Many of the kids do not have shoes and many toddlers do not have pants.  Since there are not many cars that pass by, many of the kids that we drive past stop what they are doing and wave at our bus.  The apparel that adults are wearing is all over the board, but for how dirty everything is (there is dirt everywhere and seems impossible to get away from), the clothes are really clean with white scarves worn by women.  I do not know how they do it!  In the towns we saw a number of Foosball tables, ping pong tables and kids who shine shoes. 

On the ride home just outside of a town we saw a lot of people walking to a central location and then saw a large crown standing in a large rectangle.  We soon realized that they were standing around a soccer game and the crowd was 2-3 people deep around the entire field, right up to the goal posts on both sides.  It was really neat to see.   



Glimpse of the soccer game and spectators



We got back to the care center sore from sitting and hot from the sun beating down on us the last couple of hours of the trip.  It was around 4:30 and Michele and I wanted to take a short walk.  We had not moved much in the last couple of days, so we quickly headed out.  We left and quickly found Metro Pizza, a place we had gone three years ago for St. George beers with our then travel group.  I had some money, so we stopped in and enjoyed a relaxing beer.  My memory of Metro Pizza was a lot nicer than it looked now, the outside patio was really run down, garbage on the ground and the furniture not comfortable.  I did not think it was anything great last time but certainly I thought it was better than it looked now.  This is one constant that you see in this country, the details are not tidy as we are used to.  This would be considered a dump in the US but it seems to be common upkeep, it looks OK at first glance, but when you look hard, you see things that you just do not see in most offices and establishments in the US.  In any case, we saw a couple of other Caucasians pick up pizza at the restaurant, so the cleanliness might not be great, but the food and beer is savory.

The Millennium Hotel, which had just opened last time we were there, is right next Metro Pizza.  It is now closed to everyone except for Chinese workers who are in Ethiopia working on construction projects.  So there were a number of Chinese having a beer on the patio with us.  One has to think what happens around the hotel full of men, mostly young, in a foreign country. 

After our beer we walked back to the house and dinner was being served, so we sat down and enjoyed a nice dinner with the group.  After dinner I rounded up a group of six people and we walked back to Metro Pizza for more beers.  Michele was just getting logged on to the computer when the group was ready to leave, so I said our family can wait to find out if we are OK, we have some people waiting to go drinking!

We sat inside the restaurant, got to know each other a bit better, and compared our adoption experiences.  We enjoyed two beers each and the staff was nice enough to give us some pita bread.  We wandered back to the house around 8:30 and with the electricity out, we went to sleep.