We’re about halfway into the trip, and things are going mostly as we expected. Back in the home office, we look for all sorts of criteria before we expand, but when you hit the ground, you find that what’s on the schedule doesn’t necessarily happen the way you planned it on the whiteboard in Colorado Springs.

I had hoped to come back with 10 orphanages ready to enroll in sponsorship immediately. I think we’ll hit 7 instead. The others just don’t fit with our model of community-to-community sponsorship where your church or business "adopts" the orphanage to sponsor the children and make annual visits.

I am not saying anything new when I report that Ethiopia is extremely poor. There are few job opportunities and that leads to a high unemployment rate. You sense how deep the problem is when you see how many beggars there are. Some of my friends who were missionaries here in the 1990s say that a lot of that mentality is leftover from the famine relief efforts of the 1980s. "We are the World" taught a generation of Ethiopians that white people bring money and food to fix your problems.

It seems that everyone wants to get into international adoption. There is a marked difference between the adoption facilities and the orphanages who do not do adoption. The "outside" differece is easy to see…lots of money, nice facilities, fancy suits for the staff.

In the places where there are no adoptions taking place, you find dirt, hopelessness, and difficulty.

In the midst of this, the people are amazing. I have a few leads on potential staff members for CHC–which will be our first critical decision. People make the difference, and I’m praying through the best people to invite to serve in leadership positions here.

Tomorrow I’m flying to Lalibela. Here’s a little backgrond on Lalibela from Wikipedia:

"Lalibela is a town in northern Ethiopia. Lalibela is one of Ethiopia’s holiest cities, second only to Aksum, and is a center of pilgrimage for much of the country. Unlike Aksum, the population of Lalibela is almost completely Ethiopian Orthodox Christian. Lalibela was intended to be a New Jerusalem in response to the capture of Jerusalem by Muslims, and many of its historic buildings take their name and layout from buildings in Jerusalem."

by Giustino Taken on August 20, 2005 from http://flickr.com/photos/86497274@N00/38849107/ Original caption states "Bet Giyorgis church, Lalibela"

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