The Blog is Moving

The new address is:

thehopesinafrica.wordpress.com

We made it!

After 26 hours of travel time, we finally made it to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. We are all very tired but doing fine. Within minutes of arriving at the hotel we were whisked off to our adoption agency's home to meet our new baby. We had a great first few hours with him. He is particularly enamored with his big sister, Ruby. She is as well. We are having trouble posting pictures, but will hopefully have it figured out shortly. More soon...

Update: First pic below. He's looking at Ruby. More in the morning. Must. Sleep.

Aleta Wondo Links

Our son Tarekegn is from a village called Aleta Wondo in the Sidama region of Ethiopia.  Aleta Wondo is known for producing some of the best coffee in the entire world.  It is also, as you might imagine, very poor.

We thought we would pass links to a few charities that support different projects in Aleta Wondo and the surrounding area in case anyone is interesting in donating.

http://www.aletawondo.com/Welcome.html

http://www.commonriver.org/about.htm

http://www.theliyakebedefoundation.org/projects.php#130

18,324 Miles!

I was curious to know how far we would be traveling on this journey.  So, I found a site, www.gcmap.com, that will calculate your flight distance and even generate a map showing your actual flight path.

Our flight path will take us 18,324 miles!  With our side trip factored in, we will travel almost 20,000 miles in the next few weeks.  Wow!

Welcome!

Hello, folks and welcome to our blog.  Here we will chronicle our journey to Ethiopia to complete the adoption of our seven-month-old son, Tarekegn.  We hope to post daily, but we've heard that the Internet connection in Addis Ababa can be unreliable.  So, we will do our best, but bear with us if we are offline for a few days.