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Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Our Awesome Day in Korah!

What a great day we had in Korah! Soooo many neat things happened....let me try to tell. We first met up with Ashli. She is a friend who went on our July trip and was so impacted by Korah that she moved to ET to serve there. She has been there for a month now. It's so neat to see what God is doing in her life. She walked us through Korah like she had been there forever. I had one of her ET friends, who walked with us and translated, take our pic. I guess he wanted all the people in the pic, Ha! Hope you can see it on here. He was so proud :)

We first met up with baby Judah and his mom, for those of you who have been keeping up with that story on my friend, Jodys, blog. It was neat to meet his mom and his Grandmother and see where they live. He is a baby that another girl from our trip in July connected with and now she is helping him get his visa to come to the US to have life saving surgery. It is an amazing story. He has a twin as well. It is very humbling to see how little they have, but then to see how God is making a way for them to get help.

As we walked through Korah we saw the poorest conditions, yet some of the most amazing people. I am including some pics of some of the people we met along the way. I saw this figure walking towards us in the distance with all this white hair like a bible figure or something. He let me take his pic and told me he used to be a soldier. The further into Korah we went, some of the children were scared of us because they rarely see white people. Others would let us approach them and give them a sucker.

We stopped for a home visit at one of the most beautiful woman's home. She is only 29 and she has HIV and one beautiful daughter who has HIV as well. She is on her own. She explained that her father died and her mother was murdered by her brother in a fit of rage. He is now in jail. And there she sat welcoming us with love, explaining how the Lord has blessed her because she used to be so sick and now her medicine is helping her. She has hardly anything and struggles to care for her daughter. There was sadness in her beautiful face as she told us her story, yet her hope is in the Lord. She even had written on her wall, "Jesus will never let me down." Kind of like it was her reminder to herself each day. She was just PRECIOUS. We went to the market and loaded up on food for her to help her.

We then went on a hunt for little Woguy. She is a beautiful little girl who stole my heart back in July and I wanted to see her. People kept leading us toward her home as we kept saying her name and we finally ended up there where her mother came out. I had never met her mother. Woguy was not there, she was in school. I explained to her mother how precious Woguy was to me and she invited us into her home. She is a single woman with two daughters and lives on nothing. She led us back down a rock path to a tin door. She opened it and motioned for us to walk in. It was a tiny one room little mud shack. Three of us could barely fit in it. She was talking to the translator about her situation and looked at me and acted nervous. She grabbed my hand and put it on her heart which was beating a thousand times a minute right through her chest. I just hugged her and told her it was going to be alright. She laid her head on me and looked as if she might cry. I told her we wanted to get her some food so we walked up to the market and she followed us. We loaded her up on macaroni, rice, spice, soap, oil, orange soda, etc. She put it all in her wrap and thanked us by bowing and carried it off on her back. I am just amazed! I just wonder what kind of situation she was in. Because for whatever reason we showed up out of the clear blue air because I wanted to check on her cute daughter and now they can eat for a long while. I just wanted to cry for her.

As we were leaving, this crowd of little children was running toward us. They had just gotten out of school. They all wanted to come up and shake our hand and kiss us. Oh, melt my heart! Kristi talked to one little girl that reminded her of Lucy. They had the same hair. She was sooo cute! THEN, in the middle of walking down the road, Ashli screams..."There he is! There's my boy!!" She ran up and hugged this little boy and kissed him and was crying. Evidently on our July trip she stepped off the bus and he ran into her arms and she held him for two hours while he fell asleep on he shoulder. She loved him and then she never saw him again. She said she always looks for him. Well....she found him. It literally made her whole year! What a special moment!

We then went on our quest to find my little sponsored child, Sesay. I told you yesterday that he didn't make it to boarding school like he was supposed to because his mother had stopped it. We wanted to talk to his mother about it so we set off to find them. We had no idea where they lived but were headed back to the church because Ashli said he hangs out there after school sometimes. We were still a good distance from the church, just walking down the dirt road, when seriously out of no where, Sesay steps out of a small tin door, RIGHT IN FRONT OF US!
We are stopped dead in our tracks! "Sesay!!" we ran and hugged him and told him how much we had missed him. He lit up with a great big grin. He remembered me and Lauren, and seemed real glad to see us. It was unreal. He just stepped out that door with such ease, as if God had just given him a nudge in that direction and he didn't even know why he was out there. It just so happened we were standing right in front of his home and his mother was standing there smiling, watching the whole thing. They invited us in another one room mud shack where we sat and talked to him mother, his aunt, and his uncle (i think). They told us his father left him as a baby. We pulled out all the gifts I had brought for him and he was so excited. I gave him a photo album and he turned to the picture of he and his best friend, Robel, and said "Robel, I love you." You see he and Robel were inseparable on our July trip. They were best friends and Robel and all his other friends were sent off to school while Sesay was left behind. We explained to the mom how we had sponsored him, and that he still had an open spot for the boarding school. We asked her if she would like him to go. Well.....she rambled in Amharic for a good 5 min straight. And the whole time Sesay got quiet and sad as he sat between me and Lauren just watching them intently. I had no idea what they were saying and then suddenly Sesay busts out crying....sobbing. It was the saddest thing ever. He is burying his head in my chest, crying...to the point that Kristi had to walk out because it was so sad. I stopped them and said, "Ask him why he is crying. Ask him what does HE want to do about school." So they talked to him and he answered back and said he wanted to go to the boarding school. He said all his friends are there and he wanted to go. Evidently the mother was explaining to the translator that having Sesay at home is the only way she could survive. She said there was no way at all he could go. He helps bring in 100 birr a month (which is like $7) and they need that to survive. She is a beggar. So I asked her if we helped with her living, where she would not have to beg anymore, would she want to see Sesay go to school where he would get three meals a day and an education? (because right now he is barely eating, you can tell by how skinny he is) She said that would be a dream for her. So I said, "Ok, it's done...all taken care of." She got up and bowed down in front of us and kissed my and Laurens knees where we were sitting. They said that is the highest honor of thanks in their culture. Lauren and I wiped out tears and hugged her and hugged Sesay. He now had a big grin on his face. We told them we will be back for him on Friday and take him with us to Shashemene. He had a grin from that point on and so did the mother. I can't wait to take him on Friday when he walks in and sees Robel for the first time in over a 3 months.

So needless to say, we left in awe of God and how He orchestrated every step of that whole meeting. I want to thank those of you who prayed for that, from me mentioning it on my blog post yesterday. That is what guided our steps and led us right to him, and him to us, where our paths collided, and now he has a destiny and a future and a hope. Again, I could just cry!

Lastly, we left Korah and drove over to the post office district where there is a market. I wanted to buy some cool stuff to auction off when I get back in order to raise money for adoption grants. (so get ready, cause I got some very neat, authentic Ethiopian treasures) So we immediately run into all the young boys we had met on our trip in July. They remembered us and asked where my husband and son was. How cool! We got a picture with them all. They are such sweet boys. I then run into my friend Melanie's sponsored boy. That is another cool story of her finding him and sponsoring this street child to go to boarding school. He was back in town getting a paper or something for school and getting ready to go back. (Melanie, I thought you would like that pic).

Then, I had to throw in this picture for my team in July. I ran back into the "Map Guy". I took his pic and he was a total ham. We saw this guy everywhere we turned last trip. He was selling a map and literally every time we turned around, there he was. He would just hold up that map of ET and say "Map?"  It was funny. It worked though because he was so persistent that a couple of people in our group bought a map that they had no idea what they would do with :) He didn't have his map this time :)

Whoo! Long post! Thanks for reading if you made it this far :)

Today(it's super early in the morning here), we are going to see my son's birth mom as well as visit the school his sister now goes to as well as their new home we moved them into since our last trip in July. More special moments to come. We will also stop by and visit Hannah's Hope, where my sister, Krisit's, daughter is from. Stay tuned....

Blessings.....

4 comments:

  1. your pictures tell it all ... thanks sister for using your gifts to glorify the LORD ... can't wait to chat when you get back !!

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  2. This post melted me!!!! Keep the stories coming as I love to check your blog daily:) Reading this has made my night.

    Karen
    www.hernkekid.blogspot.com
    Adopting 2 kiddos from ET
    Waiting to bring them home SOON!!!

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  3. Loving to read about your journey. Amazing what God is doing....and exciting to see what He is doing through you.

    ReplyDelete