Ethiopia: Day 4

Wednesday January 6

Today is Christmas Eve. We spent the morning hanging out at the HOH1 (the children's home) and took our pictures for the families that gave us papers. Then we hung around a bit while they were preparing for the Christmas Party. We hadn't been told the party was at lunchtime, so we didn't have our things along for that, and had to go back and get them. Good thing the guest house is close. One family went to the German embassy to get their baby a transit visa, only to find out the Embassy was closed for the Holiday when they got there.

We ate lunch, and had cake, and passed out our toys for the bigger kids. (We three traveling families had worked together to bring food treats for the staff for the party, and then small gifts for all the kids over 2.) They seemed really happy. The children were so well behaved at dinner, tho! Just sat quietly waiting for their food, and then didn't eat until after prayer. It was the cutest thing. They all sit there with their hands folded and say “amen” at just the right times. (It was a type of prayer where there were segments, and they said “amen” multiple times.)

It was pretty heartbreaking to see Isaac at the HOH1. He is obviously attached to the nannies, and one in particular. That is a good thing, that he's so attached. And I'm glad she got to say goodbye, because that would be hard on her too. But he was inconsolable afterwards, and took several minutes of screaming before he felt better. He must have been so confused, being back in his former home, and with his former "mommies," and then to be taken away again. Ugh. I don't know that we have to go back there again, since we've taken care of all our main events there. (We also delivered our donations today, which they were very appreciative of. We decided the easiest thing would be to give all the donations to the HOH and then use the money to shop for donations for the original orphanages. That way we didn't need to choose who got what, because I have no idea really what they needed most.)

It's frustrating, this transit visa stuff. KLM (our airline) says yes we definitely need one, and our travel agent had also said so. CHI staff have never had to get one for Holland before, and the Holland embassy people say “call back between 2 and 4” and then when John called back at 2, something about it that it costs 1100 birr (about $100 US) and it takes 3 days! Tsegay thinks the 3 day wait is nonsense, because no other embassies take more than one day, and do it same day on Friday. So we're just going to show up on Friday and see what happens. Then if we can't get the visa same day, we're just going to try and get on the plane without it. If they don't let us, we really haven't lost anything, except that we'll have missed our flights and have stay an extra 3 days, which we would have had to do anyway. He doesn't seem to think it's a problem, because apparently they have never even worked with the Dutch embassy before, and I'm sure we aren't the first families to have flown on KLM/Northwest. But in case, we've contacted the travel agent, and we have people on alert in case this doesn't work out and we end up staying an extra few days. Personally, I'm not that worried. We get it or we don't. Worst case, we have to stay an extra few days (course, we have to figure out what to do about our plane tickets then), but there's nothing I can do about it anyway, so there's no use in getting all crazy.

Isaac Tamirat with his favorite nanny.

Semie getting the food ready. (She is an AMAZING cook!)


And God saw that it was good.
And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.
Gen 1:18