Ethiopia part I

Our trip. Wow. I feel like I still haven't processed the sheer magnitude of it all, it was incredible, fun, exciting, sad, heartbreaking, it was everything.

We were exhausted upon landing in Addis since neither of us could sleep. The seats were small & cramped, our legs & backs ached but most of all we were just too anxious to get much rest!



The sun rising somewhere over Africa was beautiful...


Landing in Addis, the mountain views were breathtaking


We met a good portion of our travel group at the airport. Everyone in our group was fabulous-we were really lucky to have such a great group & we all really had fun together. We are planning to have a yearly reunion since all of us are from the Midwest (IL, WI, IA, MN)


Massi picked us up from the airport where we all crowded into 1 van and all of our luggage crowded into another. Our 1st stop was the guest house-it is such a beautiful building. It is surrounded by other beautiful homes, all with razor wire above the gates and each with it's own guard. It was hard to swallow the drastic difference between the haves & the have-nots in Addis. We saw so much poverty everywhere, yet turn down one muddy, unpaved road and there are these HUGE homes with fancy Land Rovers in the driveways. It didn't sit right with me.
It was very weird to drive through the streets of Addis, to see goats available for sale & slaughter on the corner in front of the Home Depot (yes, you heard me correctly a Home Depot), down the muddy hill from where we would be staying.
But there was beauty everywhere. Ethiopia is truly a breathtakingly beautiful country.


The view from the roof was incredible


Massi gave each of us a packet containing pictures and info. on our little ones. It was a little overwhelming, looking at the pictures of Nora, pictures we wished we had while we waited. She looked so different and so smiley! The packet contained her "schedule" and some likes/dislikes. It was very weird to be looking at that packet and knowing that she was less than a mile away!

They took us all over to the building where the infants live and we waited in a room for a social worker to call our names. When she came in and said "Tigist?" I thought I was going to faint. As we walked over, someone was filming the entire thing-it was very surreal. They took us into her little room in the Mussie building, which she shared with 6 or so others and there she was! Smiling away & playing with her hands! That is all I remember from that moment-thankfully, it is all on film! We were only able to spend about 15 minutes with her before we were ushered away:(

Part II to follow shortly..........