Project Impact!

As you know our family did not make it through court along with the other three families last week. We appreciate all the prayers that were lifted up on our behalf. I struggled with the fact that we were before a judge seven times and still no success. I asked God why...and his answer, "I have more that I need done. You can do more to impact Ethiopia than just bringing two children home."

My husband has been in the grocery industry for thirty years and many people in the industry have watched our family grow through adoption and have been very interested, but never have offered any help and we have never asked. But in the last two-three weeks our family has received enough offers from various vendors to fill either a 20ft or 40ft containter (depending on logistics)with supplies for the transition house and orphanages that AWAA works with in Addis. Diapers, formula, wipes, peanut butter, peanuts, almonds, beef jerky, powdered milk are just some of the items that have been committed. ( For those of you adopting older children I am sure you have noticed the lack of protien they are receiving in their diet! Another footnote: After a golf tournament Ray was in three weeks ago they gave our family all the left over snacks: cases of peanuts, protien bars, Cliff bars, and candy. My garage is full of these products! How random is that! We have a lot of kids, but we could not eat that many peanuts!) We received two large finacial donations that would cover a potion of the shipping costs or simply be used to purchase supplies in country.Please understand that we never asked for any of these items to come our way. This is why we believe this is a movement from God. I have been in contact with our family coordinator and the costs to run the TH have skyrocketed since the "Green Famine" has impacted the country! If we could get this container into Ethiopia we could ease the burden for quite a while. The big question is "IF". I ask anyone who reads this to pray about what God is doing here. Ray and I have never shipped a container overseas and the process is very complicated and expensive. God is putting us in contact with very knowledgeble people that can get this done, but we need wisdom about all this. At the same time we are investivaging the possibiliity of raiseing funds for some much needed items like cribs and clothing for the kids. AWAA is setting up a separate account for the funds to begin to be collected for this project. Our desire has always been to help those who really need help. We certainly do not feel qualified to accomplish this task although we know if it is of God it will be accomplished.

Our prayer is for wisdom with what God is asking us to do. Do we ship a container or just buy the supplies in country? We also ask that many people in both the US and Ethiopia would be impacted for God because of his mercy and grace in this project. Let us know if you want to get involved.
Here is another article to help explain what the "Green Famine" is and how it is effecting the Ethiopian economy.