Why Ethiopia??

Why Ethiopia??  You may be wondering why we chose Ethiopia over other countries or domestic adoption.  We have known that adoption has been on our hearts for a few years.  We just didn't know if it would ever happen.  We knew international adoption was really expensive, but our heart has always been in foreign countries with orphaned children.

We originally got our foster license hoping we would be able to adopt our nephews, but that didn't happen.  The state of Indiana would license us to adopt our nephews, but not other children.  They don't let you foster other children if you have 5 or more in your home.  We have been licensed for 2-3 years and have only had one placement for one day.  That was only because they couldn't find anyone in the middle of the night to take a newborn baby.  They took her the next afternoon and moved her.  We have never had another placement.  So adopting a infant from the foster care system will never happen for our family.

As far as trying to adopt an infant straight from a birth parent domestically is very unlikely.  It is very doubtful that they would choose a large family.  There are so many families out there who are waiting to adopt a baby locally, that we figured we would leave the US to them.

 There are a lot of countries that adopt children out to the US.  There are not very many countries that we can adopt from though.  There are only a few countries that will adopt out infants and that allow families with more than 4 children to adopt.  We have 2 friends who have adopted from Africa, we have another friend who will be starting the process soon and another friend who is adopting from Europe.  I started looking up information about these different countries that we could adopt from.  The different things I was reading and watching on the internet basically all had the same statistics.  With 150 million orphans in the world, 48 million of those orphans live in Africa, 5 million of those  children live in Ethiopia (half the size of Texas).   Half of those children will never attend school and 88% will never attend secondary school.  1 in 10 children die before their first birthday.  The average income is under $1 a day. After reading all those statistics (everything I researched, they kept coming up everywhere)and watching gotcha videos from Ethiopia, I knew that was the country we would adopt from.  I prayed about it and talked to Chris and then we both prayed about it.  We talked to some friends and they prayed about it for us too.  We know this is where God is leading us to adopt from.  This is my favorite gotcha day video that I saw!!  I bet you can't watch it and not cry your eyes out.  This is the video I was watching when Logan came up to me, looked at the tears going down my face and sat down to watch it with me.  I read all the statistics out loud and he saw all the babies and told me we need to go get one of those babies!  In my mind, I was thinking, I couldn't agree more!