HAPPY LAUNCH DAY!!

Today is the day! The sun is shining, the snow is freezing, and the kiddos are awaiting sponsorship at our carepoint!!

Please check out the website for Children's Hopechest and read all about our carepoint at Addis Ketma. Then look at pictures of 50 of the children needing assistance and select one to sponsor!
http://www.hopechest.org/community/ketma-2/sponsor/


We would love it if you shared a picture of the child you selected on our facebook page at
https://www.facebook.com/groups/HopechestKetma/.


Help us spread the word!

Our site is READY!!

That should actually be in all caps because I AM SO EXCITED to launch the site and start signing up sponsors with our kiddos in need in Ketma.

To sponsor a child we are asking you to donate $38 a month.

With this money you provide these basic necessities for your sponsor kiddo. You can also write letters to them, send care packages whenever a group travels to Ketma, and receive letters/pictures from them as well.

To you that $38 is equivalent to eating at a sit down restaurant one less time a month. Buying one less shirt a month. Buying the off brand household products instead of name-brand.

But to this child it is equivalent to : food, clean water, clothing, basic medical care, and various Capital Improvement Projects that as a group we will make possible.

As someone who has sponsored for over two years now, I can promise you that these children notice that money in their life way more than you’ll notice not having it.

Right now we have around 150 children needing sponsorships.  We need your help!

Pictures from the trip

We forgot the best part

The turkeys cooked, potatoes are mashed, the wine is open (if you’re like my family anyways) and it’s time for the mayhem to begin. Typically what my family does is stand in a lopsided circle and hold hands, some of us with babies on our hips, some of us with eyes open to make funny faces at a nephew while we pray. During dinner we will take turns saying what we are most thankful for this year.

Somehow this year, between the madness of two pregnant sisters, a plethora of children running around, and puppies running between legs to catch fallen food, we missed out on my favorite part. 

Honestly, my family is composed of some of the most selfless, giving, compassionate people I’ve known. We are all very emotional and passionate people. We share our feelings of gratitude with each other and others on a regular basis. Ungrateful isn’t a word I would use to describe any of them. The truth is we are just very busy and distracted.

But the more I’ve thought about our wonderful Thanksgiving together the more it bothered me that we all forgot to include the best part: thanking each other for the love and support that has gotten us through another year and for all the blessings in our life. 

Being busy isn’t an excuse I want to accept for not telling the people I love thank you for all they’ve done for me. I don’t want myself or my family to get lazy about our gratitude. Forgetting to be thankful for every single thing will lead us to be less concerned about what others don’t have. I would bet a billion dollars (or whatever may be in my bank account) that none of the children I hung out with in Ethiopia would forget to be thankful for even one second for some of the conveniences I take for granted every day. It’s Thanksgiving so I expect to see a big fat turkey on the table; I don’t take into account how much that meat would mean to an Ethiopian family. I get wrapped up in my taken-for-granted traditions and forget that the cost of that turkey could support an entire family for a month or more in Ethiopia and countries like it.

Realizing this doesn’t mean that I can’t enjoy Thanksgiving or the Holidays just because I can’t give every African family a big Thanksgiving dinner. It would be unreasonable to give up everything in my lifestyle and try to match my world to theirs or vice versa. Our societies are different as well as our expectations. But at the very least I can remember to be thankful for what I have and help those who don’t have as much. 

Two months after returning from Ethiopia and here’s another self-realization. I’m sure this won’t be the last.

Ketma on my brain!

God always finds a way to talk to me through his servants when I need it most, and yet am not expecting it. Since I’ve been back from Ethiopia I’ve been on an inner-emotional roller coaster. I go up and down from feeling grateful, to feeling helpless, to feeling flat out angry. I’ve questioned my capability a lot, asking myself “can anything I do really make in impact in this region where the need is so great?”

I have to admit, like I’m sure most of the missionaries before me have admitted, sometimes I struggle with the overwhelming need of our world, not just in Ethiopia. It’s hard for me to keep in mind that by changing one life at a time, I am bettering the world, because sometimes that small change doesn’t feel like enough.

These pessimistic thoughts have stalled my progress and I could feel myself losing sight of my vision.

Luckily for me, God is unwavering and he is more optimistic than I could ever be alone. My friends from HopeChest continued to email and call, asking where my head is, asking where my heart is, and sending ideas on ways that might be perfect for me to get involved and stay there.

Their persistence has helped get me back on track.

Since returning from our trip my friend Ashley and I have been discussing with HopeChest different ways that our community can partner with an Ethiopian community and provide sponsorships and further a carepoint. I am so excited and overwhelmed that we finally found a partnership with a church in Rochester, MN who has struggled to get enough sponsors for the children in the area. I think together we can double or triple the amount of monthly donations and then start to work on bigger projects for the area of Ketma.

The area is close to a slum and the citizens are in dire need of clean and healthy water, discipleship, and prayer. The Carepoint is near Awassa, the city we spent most of our time in on our trip, and we will be working alongside our new friends on-site in Ethiopia, Alex and Tesfa, who are just amazing examples of Christ followers.

Now Ashley and I are going to set off on convincing our networks of family, friends, coworkers and neighbors to sponsor a child at $38 a month and help us help this area in need.

I can’t help but feel so overwhelmingly grateful and empowered that these people at HopeChest believe in us and believe we can make a difference. I’m so thankful for their understanding of my fluctuating emotions and that despite this they didn’t give up on my vision for me. Now I read this quote daily as a reminder that a small difference is all it takes to make someone’s world a better place.

“We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.- Mother Theresa”

I get an F for my internet silence

So sorry to all my readers (all 2 of you) for not posting anything in so long. My trip was….hard to put in to words to say the least.

I wrote a lot of journals and notes while I was there but my internet wasn’t the best and silly old me forgot to bring the right kind of charger for my laptop. Excuses, excuses.

Bottom line is I haven’t actually been able to form a lot of clear, concise thoughts on everything I experienced. I’ve decided to start with the easy stuff and hope that it will lead me in to the topics I know I need to get in writing, but haven’t been able to do so.

When we got to Ethiopia we traveled about 4 hours south of the Capitol to Awassa. It’s a beautiful , almost tropical climate. A perfect description of how I always pictured Africa in my mind, with monkeys on trees and beautiful plains and flowering trees. There was something magical, sad, inspiring, and breathtaking about the contrast between nature’s beauty and some of the slums and towns we drove through. The vast contrast of everyday living in Ethiopia to the life I’ve always known will never cease to amaze me.

How can these people I see living in mud huts with 5 family members, seem so happy and content? Why are they so friendly to everyone they see? How do I find that inner happiness too? I was ready to feel sympathetic and sad, ready to feel excited to help. I can tell you honestly that jealousy is something I never expected to feel when visiting Africa. But I was. Jealous that they figured out how to get by on so little and still have a zest and appreciation for life that I have never come close to, and I like to think I am a pretty happy person.

It made me realize that my idea of how to help these communities is completely different than what I thought before this trip. And how counterproductive it would be to just hand out money on a street and fix temporary needs for these people. Next week I will be gone and so will that money and those same people begging will be back in that some spot.
Instead I think we need to work together to teach others how to improve their own conditions; how to rely on God and hard work to get the earthly things we need like clean drinking water, education and medical care.

This is not to say it was easy to say no to the mothers with naked, malnourished babies on their backs as they would come up to the car and ask repeatedly for birr, which is the Ethiopian currency. It was heartbreaking. I wanted to explain to her that I wanted to help but giving her money was more detrimental than helpful. If I was starving and so was my child and someone said that to me I would want to slap them. So instead we would try to say no and wait for her to leave the car window. Feeling guilty and disappointed.

And guilt is something I do think we should feel. Because over the centuries we have enabled this society as well as similar societies to accept this as their norm. White people come to town, give them money, and leave. That is how it has been for centuries. My way of thinking when I am short on money is to clean out my closet, pick up shifts at a restaurant, something because I have been taught not to rely on the charity of others. But now when poor Ethiopians need help, for the most part, and I’m trying not to generalize, instead of thinking like this, they wait for the tourists and missionaries to come to town and give them whatever they need.

This solves their temporary problem maybe, but we are taking away from them their work ethic, their independence, their pride, and so much more. I think it’s time we stop and look at what we are doing to help and ask ourselves if there are better ways to do so.

I’m excited to work with Hopechest and discover ways to enable the communities I saw rather than giving them handouts.


“Poverty alleviation occurs when the power of Christ's resurrection reconciles our key relationships through the transformation of both individual lives and local, national, and international systems.” When Helping Hurts.

This isn't okay with me.

I have been struggling to swallow a mood of anger, sadness, and disappointment for quite some time now. (Thus the reasoning behind my blogger silence). I can’t watch the news without getting angry and yelling at the TV, or scroll through my Facebook feed without rolling my eyes and hitting the “hide- I don’t want to see posts like this” button.

The strange part is I am not mad at any one or anything in particular, so it’s difficult to put it into words. I’m mad at all of us. Myself included.

How are we, not as Americans or members of a certain religious group or political group, but we as humans, okay with watching what celebrity wore what designer to the VMA’s last week when last week thousands were slaughtered a few hours across the ocean?

The crisis in Gaza strip should terrify us and wake us up to want to do something to help our brothers and sisters so many miles apart. Instead it is covered in a 30 second segment on the news and then we continue on with who Kim Kardashian is marrying or what self-deprecating stunt Miley Cyrus pulled this week. How can Kim Kardashian’s social life even compare to the tragedies going on in the Middle East and Africa? How many seconds of airtime are given to the Gaza Strip each day in comparison with celebrity gossip? It makes me sick to my stomach that we as a population have allowed ourselves to be so mindlessly entertained by these things instead of paying attention to the bigger problems- let alone getting off of our arsenals and doing something to help.

My sweet oldest sister, Erika, has been my personal therapist while I’ve been trying to make sense of all of this and work through it. She lets me vent and cry and try to figure out a way to do more than just feel sympathetic. More than that though she doesn’t try to convince me it’s all okay or let me shy away from these huge, overwhelming tragedies. Instead she asks me some really hard questions and makes me think things I don’t want to think about. Like why thousands of innocent children have been beheaded and can I imagine if that was my wonderful nieces and nephews?

No I can’t imagine and quite frankly I don’t want to. I see my nephew Seth’s big brown eyes in every horrible picture of an ISIS victim I see now. I want to save them all. And I weep for the ones we couldn’t save. How can this be happening?

Erika and I have come to one very simple conclusion that I repeat to myself dozens of times each day now. This isn’t okay with me.

It’s not okay with me that every day 25,000 people (mostly children) die from drinking dirty water.

It’s not okay that there are 100 million children in the world who live on the street not knowing when or if they will eat again.

It’s not okay with me that the crisis in the Middle East has forced 22 million people out of their home and country. (That’s just slightly under the population of ALL of Texas, y’all. Can you imagine trying to help find food, homes and refuge for EVERYONE in Texas?). The death toll adds another 200,000+ to that number if our statistics are correct. In the middle of a genocide I don’t think accurate body count should be a huge priority so forgive my sources if this number is wrong.

The difference between me and them is simply an unfair accident that I was born in St. Joseph, Missouri and they were born elsewhere
.
I can no longer sit in my safe little cocoon, drinking my un-diseased water, not fearing for my life, and telling myself that it’s someone else’s problem.

It is OUR problem. I’m tired of the “we” versus “them” mentality that has become the norm. Why does it matter if it’s an African child or an Iranian child or an American child? I want you (whoever you are) to close your eyes to your stereotypes and biases. Close your eyes and just love them all.

It’s not okay with me to do nothing any more. I don’t want it to be okay for you, either.


“Surely faith without action is dead. Let Your kingdom come. Lord break this heart.” (Lincoln Brewster’s song “Power of your name”. Listen to it if you haven’t.)



Ethiopia countdown: 23 days.



Sources:

https://sites.google.com/site/rinconsogi/10-40-window
https://www.dosomething.org/facts/11-facts-about-global-poverty
http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/syrias-crisis-figures-deaths-refugees-and-damage-1110944222