Some pictures from Ethiopia

**Just a reminder about the Christmas Trees of Glory post below.
**Also, another family we met through our agency who adopted two of the most gorgeous little twin girls you will ever see is selling beautiful Ethiopian scarves to fundraise for women and orphans in Ethiopia.  They are $10 each and going fast!  Another great idea for Christmas gifts with a cause.  Visit them by clicking HERE.  It's worth clicking just to see a pic of their cuties!

Now for my post...

I've been thinking a lot about Ethiopia lately.  We've been home from Ethiopia for 9 months, but have recently been going through the pictures from that our time in the country.  When I look back at the pictures we took, I am reminded just how beautiful and just how poor our childrens' birthplace is.

These first pictures are from the small village outside of Mekele where both of our children came from.

This was the road leading to the orphanage our children lived in for half a year.  Eden likely walked this road hand-in-hand with her birth mother in their last minutes together.  Her mother, full of grief, likely walked this road home after saying goodbye to her daughter.  Tobey was smaller, his young mother likely carried him, possibly as he slept so that he wouldn't know what was happening, as she handed him over to strangers with the hope that he would have a better life than the one she could give him as a young, single mother.  She too, likely walked away full of grief knowing she may never again see the son that grew in her womb, the son who had likely survived primarily on her breast milk until that very day.  They have probably walked this same road many times since that day.  It's a main road leading out of their village.  I wonder if they still grieve, if they walk the long way out so that they don't have to walk this road, so that they don't have to have a fresh reminder of they day they said good-bye.

 

These next pictures were taken on a day trip to an area about an hour from Mekele.  The countryside in that area is stunningly beautiful.  I was speechless much of the drive as I looked out the window and took it all in.

These last pictures were taken in the capital.  The scene there is so different...so crowded, so dirty, so "tin", men, women and children sitting around for lack of nothing else to do, homeless and beggars living on the sidewalks, one after another after another.