Care Center - Day 2 - June 26th

We get our first glimpse of the city in the daylight. Well actually we realized our hotel was located at the edge of the town where the city meets the rural area. The field across from the hotel was filled with activity, you cannot tell by the picture but there are hundreds of people walking around on their way to work, school, market. God had protected our hearts this day as we seemed to have tunnel vision of the amount of poverty and hardship. The things that we were seeing were unreal and for some reason we were numb for the time being. This would change as we began to know the people and begin to fall in love with the people of Ethiopia.



We got cleaned up and ready to go meet our kiddos. We had an orientation to ask questions about the activities for the week and go over what our schedule looked like. They asked are you ready to go to the care center and all of us answered with a resounding YES!

We load up in the vans and head over to the care center. Below are the first pictures of us in front of the care center.

We enter a front area at the care center full of children. The director of the center asks us all to find out children and we start looking for Millennium. After about 10 minutes of looking we passed our first parent test, she wasn't in the room. We went up to the second floor with one of the nannies to get our first glimpse of our little girl.

In your head you envision the moment in many different ways. We both had tears in our eyes as we scanned the room for our little girl. All the pictures we had received of her she did not have hair, so I guess we always pictured her without hair. She was playing in the center of the room and we simply walked up to her sat down and began introducing ourselves. To be honest to both of us it felt natural, this path we had walked for 10 months to this moment made so much sense. We looked at her she looked at us and it was as if God was revealing that before all of this even existed this was the plan. It felt right and it felt really good to finally be with our little girl.


It is amazing to look at the evolution of her comfort for us. I cannot imagine the emotions of confusion she must have had when these strangers were picking her up and saying her name. That evening we returned to the hotel to go over forms and paperwork we would need to ensure that the embassy process would go smoothly.

We returned to our hotel room after dinner and slept better than we had in months.