Why Ethiopia?

This is my first blog entry...thanks to Dana for all her hard work so far on this. I wanted to just put in a little bit on why we chose Ethiopia. As we talked about before, Dana and I have always had a heart for international adoption but never had in mind a specific country. Our heart for international adoption came from our work on several international short-term medical mission trips. During these trips we came to realize just how many orphans there are abroad that need a loving family. We chose Bethany Christian Services as our adoption agency because of their good reputation. When we started the process through Bethany there were multiple options with respect to country which included Bulgaria, China, Colombia, Ethiopia, Haiti, Hong Kong, Lithuania, Philippines, Russia, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Ukraine.

Different countries have different requirements to qualify for adoption. This has nothing to do with our adoption agency, these are strictly country-specific requirements. Some require the parents to be a certain age, some require the marriage to be of a certain length. All the countries require travel to that country, however, some require a prolonged stay (up to 4-6 weeks) or multiple trips. With the work schedule Dana and I have, a prolonged stay or multiple trips would not be possible for us, so God closed the door on those particular countries. Some we did not meet the age or marriage length requirements. After reviewing the requirements of each country and after careful consideration and prayer we decided that Ethiopia was the country God wanted us to adopt from.

In Ethiopia there are over 6 million orphans. Many are orphans because their parents have died of HIV/AIDS, and many have been given to the orphanages by family members because they were unable to financially provide for the child. Some of the older children were brought to the orphanage by police or a social service agency because they have no home and live in the streets. The need is overwhelming but we are excited to take a child/children without a family and show them the love of Christ!