So the plan was to be up at 4:45am and be packed and ready for breakfast at 5:30am and be in the van at 6am.
Whoever planned that plan has obviously not given my mother prescription sleep medication. I say this lovingly because she has already made fun of herself for it many times. One alarm was set but never turned on, and the other somehow wandered into the bathroom late at night and thus was not heard by the narc’d out women wearing earplugs in the bedroom.
I woke up at about 1:30am and couldn’t get back to sleep but made a mental deal with myself that I had to lay there until 4am before I was allowed to get up. This is classic Ethiopian sleep drama for me just like last time. The deal I made with myself must have worked because I think I finally relaxed back to sleep again around 4am. I woke up at random at 5:40am and realized no alarms had gone off. Mom and I sprinted and made it downstairs around 6am and our driver was gracious enough to let us eat quick and take our malaria meds.
We were on the road and making our way out of town not long after 6am. We traveled with Muluneh who is one of the Holt staff here and one of the Holt drivers. Muluneh also brought some of his family. The pictures and video we attempted to take of the countryside just doesn’t do it justice. It’s beautiful, but also breaks your heart at the same time. We saw women carrying jugs and children herding donkeys for hours just to get decent water to take back to the huts along the road. We saw farmers working crops by hand with what most would call “primitive” tools, however resourceful. We shared the road with big trucks and wagons pulled by donkeys. We have a fair amount of video, but even that doesn’t really describe being there. The further we drove, the more we moved into the mountains of the lowlands which was much more lush and green. Navigating the mountain roads was a bit tricky.
The Shinshicho clinic that was built by Holt and provides basic health care to the area.
Durame is a region and Shinshicho is a village within the region and where Ben was born. Although our Holt worker speaks English, it is still limited once in awhile so while I was being taken to where he was found I didn’t really grasp what was going on. Usually families travel to Durame to meet with the birth parents which I knew would not be the situation for our case. I was just hoping to take some pictures of something. As we drove through Shinshicho, we bounced through muddy streets after the rain that had come through and people smiled and waived to us. We pulled up outside a school which I was told was a private secondary school. 4 men in suits came out to shake my hand but I didn’t really know why. We pulled up to pick up the social worker for the town, an older lady in African dress who was probably about 5 ft tall. We walked with her and a crowd of children forming down a dirt road. The social worker knocked on a residential home of a lady that was one of the witnesses for Ben’s case. At that point it clicked and I put it together… near the school.. person who knows something. I was about to see where Ben started his journey to me.
Muluneh and some of his paparazzi helpers
Shinshicho village social worker and two of the women who testified for his case
And for comic relief for such a heavy heavy topic, here is some sweet flushing of a really nasty toilet!
I will leave out the rest of the details for the sake of privacy, but it was such a humbling experience. I remember looking at Lucas’ little face as he was being handed to me at FANA in 2008 and just being floored by God’s grace to me. Yesterday I stared at this spot in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere Ethiopia where a tiny baby boy started his journey to ME.
I must note, that God does not love me or Ben or any child more or less than he loves the children that are left to wander the streets of Ethiopia or any other country. It is just a mystery that we have to let go and let faith take over. I don’t like it, and I don’t blame you if you don’t either. However, on this day, I need to give thanks for this one little boy that God allowed to be spared of that life. It just boggles my mind how something was happening 8,000 miles away from me in May of 2010 and that the story is coming to a close this week as Ben officially joins our family not just legally but physically.
I have been blessed with many “out of the box” experiences in my life, the majority of which I never planned. Each time, I get the sense that God is trying to teach me that I should quit limiting the options of his plans. I have two children from 2 continents for goodness sake… 2 continents I didn’t even visit until the last 8 years or so of my life. It inspires and yet weirds me out what He might have planned for my family in the future. There are brief moments, moments that have lessened with the passage of time, where I still don’t jump up and down with excitement over all aspects of being an adoptive parent- like baby showers for pregnant women etc. There are some pieces of “normal” woman life that just won’t be my story… but I suppose I have learned that perhaps the “normal” motherly experience must not be my road. Perhaps what I have learned in the past 1.5 years of this journey that I should have known all along is that God is obviously still good. He keeps His promises even if they don’t look like we think they will… and here I sit less than 24 hours from taking custody of a little boy who started his path to me 367 days ago… and God is still GOOD.
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