(Amharic for "family")

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Journal Entry 9-19-07

Thursday

We had a hard time sleeping during the night, waking up around 2AM to make sure Mehandis was doing okay and getting little sleep the rest of the night. He was still sleeping at 6AM but we could not wait for him to wake up on his own, so we woke him up at 6:30 and he smiled at us. So we brought him into our bed and he was as happy as could be, laughing and smiling at us. We then got out the camera and took some fun pictures of us in bed together. We got up around 7:30, fed and changed him and got ready for breakfast. We had good pancakes for breakfast and were off at 9AM to see the new CHSFS hospital. There was a slight bit of misinformation on how long the trip would be; we thought we were told that it would take 1 hour to get there but it was only about 15 minutes and the whole trip took about 1 hour. The new hospital is set up to handle new parents to care for their newborn children and simple surgery. This was set up for the poor. It was a nice facility with a staff that was really looking to help.
After the clinic we stopped back at the guesthouse and picked up our donations for AHOPE and drove there, which was only about 5 minutes away. AHOPE works with HIV positive children and we got to meet about 35 kids there. It was not nearly as nice as the care center through CHSFS but the kids seemed very happy. The staff was nice and gave us a tour. The kids came outside and came up to us, they were cute and were kind. It help good to give these donations to this organization, you can easily see that they needed the funds to keep going and were doing good work. They had three facilities in Addis, all of them about the same size.

When we got back we changed and fed Mehandis. Soon it was lunch time and we joined the group for lunch while Mehandis took a nap. After lunch I walked to the care center with Greg and Jarusha while Michele took a nap. I was finally able to get on the internet and let our family know how we are doing. I sent an e-mail to our parents to post on the blog and they were very happy to hear from us (we never called them while we were there). I read many of the e-mails that we had and saw that the Cubs had moved one game ahead of the Brewers in the standings. I made copies of the addresses of the people in the house, purchased some formula and walked back to the house. Michele and I hung outside with Mehandis for a bit but soon he looked tired. So we took him to bed for a bit to sleep but he was unable to sleep. We gave him his pacifier and he started playing with it like it was an airplane, buzzing it all around. We laughed really hard at his playing. So soon we gave up on his nap and we fed him. We moved to the front room and while we were sitting there, he had a HUGE blow out. Michele was holding him and all of a sudden felt warm and knew she was in trouble. It got all over her pants and the leather couch, and of course Mehandis. Russ, David, Michele and I went into emergency mode to get him and the room cleaned up. We took him right into a bath and got him clean. After his bath, he was a happy boy.

After dinner we sat in the main room with our kids, playing and talking about the trip since most of the group would be leaving the next day. Most people on trip had a great experience. The dogs barked outside during the night, the pillows were not soft and the beds were not comfortable. But overall it had been great.

We put Mehandis to bed around 7:30PM and left him while he was still awake but he fell asleep on his own. Nice!!! We joined Greg, Jarusha, John and Alicia and had a drink in the mainroom. We went to bed around 9:30PM.

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