I woke up early on Wednesday, I had a hard time sleeping. I got out of bed around 5:30 and went outside for a bit. I then wandered back inside and sat on the couches for a while. Eventually the others got up and soon it was time for breakfast. Breakfast was simple oatmeal and it was very good. After getting ready for the day, I heard the driver outside playing with the soccer ball, so I went outside and joined him. Soon Massi joined us and the three of us juggled the soccer ball in the courtyard for a while. It was a warm sunny morning and I was soon sweating. It was a good time playing soccer with these guys.
The buses left at 8:45 to take us shopping. We first stopped at some shops on a decent area of the city. The shopkeepers were nice and we found some good gifts for us, Mehandis and our house. We purchased a head rest, a purse, necklace, baby doll, two outfits for Mehandis, a drum and two pictures for our wall. Everything was very reasonably priced.
Then we drove to another store that was a bit nicer than the small shops that were in and most of the same things, but a less expensive price. We purchased a bracelet for Michele, a statue for the mantel and two crosses. Then we were off to the Markato.
The Markato is the largest and oldest open air market in all of Aftrica. To say it is huge in an understatement, it is enormous. There was too much to describe and put into words. But basically anything you can think of is sold here. You can watch the streets for hours and see a tremendous range of products, people and vehicles for transporting goods. We saw donkeys carrying products, mattresses piled 10 high on a car, a man carrying dead chickens, wooden toothbrushes, shoes piled to the ceiling and on and on. The road traffic was crazy busy, it could take 10 minutes to drive one block and there were people everywhere walking between cars. It was really a site to see.
We finally left the Markato and cruised back to the care center. We went to the grocery store, picked up some goods and kolo (the snack we had at Metro Pizza). Laura and Greg bought a bike for the kids to ride in the courtyard. We stopped at one more store to purchase some items and then we went back to the guest house. We enjoyed good leftovers for lunch and it was a nice conversation with the group.
After lunch it was raining but Michele and I wanted to go to the office to finally e-mail an update to our family. So we walked in the rain for the 15 minute walk but it was only bad for the last five minutes. However when we got to the office, the power was out, so we had to wait. We waited for about 25 minutes and there was still no power. Since it had stopped raining, we walked back to the guesthouse. We ran into Greg Kenyon on the way back and gave him the news about the lack of power, so he walked back with us. We got back and took a nice nap.
We woke up around 3PM and we got ready for go to the send off ceremony at the care center. We got picked up around 3:30 and went to the care center. We were taken into the basement where all of the toddlers got to sit at one end of the room and we were all lined up against the wall around the room. They had a large Ethiopian flag painted on the wall that had the handprint of all of the kids who had been adopted in the year 2007. Soon enough all of the adopted kids came down the stairs in their traditional Ethiopian outfits. The funny story about this was that we were thought we were told that we needed to purchase this outfit for the kids, so all of us purchased these outfits at the store in the morning. There was even a rumor that the outfits we purchased would be donated to the care center Well it turned out that they supplied the outfits and we got to keep them. So this got really lost in the translation.
We started off the ceremony with a prayer and then some of the parents got to speak up with their thoughts on the care that the kids received and overall impressions. Two of the guys spoke up and then Michele said some nice things. Then all of the kids, one by one, with the help of their new parents, put a mark on the wall with their hands. Mehandis handled this part extremely well. Then the nannies took the children for one last time, hugged them and then gave them back to us and they hugged the new parents. We then had a prayer from CHSFS, then Shannon from our group said a nice prayer as well. The ceremony quickly ended and we enjoyed cake and soda. We got a picture of the nanny with Mehandis and we were soon off to the guest house with Mehandis. Soon it was time for dinner and I ate with Mehandis sitting on my lap.
After dinner we went to the main room and played with Mehandis. Soon we went into our room and gave him a bath. We got to see all of his skin issues and saw why he needed the skin cream and diaper rash cream. He was great in the bathtub, holding himself up and enjoying the water. We played with him a bit more since he was in such a good mood, but it was soon to put him to sleep. He put him down at 7:30 extremely easily, without a cry. We stayed for up a bit longer, had a nice drink and went to bed around 9:30. First we had to give Mehandis his medicine and he refused to wake up for it, so it was a bit tough. But soon enough he finished it up and went quickly back to sleep.
Michele and I looked through the pictures from the day before turning off the lights. Michele had been a bit emotional during the send off ceremony and now it was my turn. I was certainly not expecting this, but I was all of a sudden overwhelmed with emotion because Mehandis was so happy, just a great little kid. We had gone through so much over the years of trying to have kids, giving up and deciding to go down the adoption trek. Then a year later from starting the process we were in Ethiopia and now had full custody of this great little kid. We were both so happy.
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