A trip during our trip

Only 3 more days until we hit the road...to begin our traveling to Ethiopia. After work on Wednesday, we will drive to Illinois and stay the night at my parents' house - since we are flying out of Chicago. Around noon on Thursday, Michael's dad will take us to the airport. Our flight is scheduled to take off in the afternoon and we then will land in Frankfurt. There will be 3 hours to spend in Germany (sightseeing in the airport) and then we board a new plane which will take us to Sudan. The stopover in Sudan is just an hour until the plane takes off again for Ethiopia. We land in Addis Ababa late on Friday evening and will be met by representatives from CHSFS. They will drive us to the guest house and we are then told to get a good night's rest.... since we will meet Mehandis the next morning on Saturday!

So that wraps up the first part of our trip. The "trip within the trip" comes on Sunday, when we wake early in the morning in order to begin a 4 hour drive to Hosanna. Hosanna is south of Addis, and it is the location where we will have an opportunity to meet some of Mehandis's relatives. Our agency regularly coordinates meetings with birth relatives and adoptive families in this city. We will go with a group of other families, each driven in separate cars, in hopes that representatives from our children's families will be there to meet with us. The meetings typically last around 30 minutes and have 1 to 2 translators (depending on the language of the birth family) present. We are able to ask questions and the birth family can ask questions of us. At that time we are encouraged to give the following things as gifts for the family- a hinged double frame that have our picture and Mehandis's picture, a photo of a neighborhood school and a map of the world showing where the family lives and where we live. It will be an incredible opportunity for us to learn more about our son's heritage and hopefully be helpful for Mehandis's birth family as well. Mehandis will not be with us during this trip, but we will have the chance to take a picture of his relatives and have more information to share with him at a later time.

The pictures below are 2 of the 3 photos that will be given to Mehandis's family. The third photo is our son's original referral picture.