Rwanda in Pictures

Thought I'd take a minute to post some pictures from our trip. Due to the technological unsaaviness that plagues me, I have no idea how to do captions for the individual photos! Sigh. So, unfortunately for you, I have listed them all below.
1) "The Blue Gate" - sounds very "Lord of the Rings-ish", doesn't it? This is the gate to the entrance of the orphanage. Actually, there are a lot of blue gates in Kigali, but this one is very special!

2) Sugarcane field outside of Kigali

3) Rwandan boys posing for camera. We had pulled off the road to take some scenery pictures when we heard this group of boys yelling, "Muzungus!", which means white person in Kinyarwandan. They came down to the car and wanted to practice their English with us. They were more than happy to ham it up for a good picture!

4) Cheesy grin!

5)First experience with bubbles

6)More sugarcane on the way to Lake Rwesero

7)This monkey was the full extent of our "wildlife" experience in Rwanda. He was at Lake Rwesero and was quite the character. Molly found that out when she stood just a tiny bit too close to the cage and he pulled her braid!

8) Moses trying out his sea legs on the dock

9)Lake Rwesero

10) All 5 adopted children with Nyanja.

11) Sister Katherine and Moses. Sister Katherine is from France and she is the one who came to Nyanja shortly after Moses was transferred to Home of Hope and asked her to find him a family specifically.

12) Traditional Ethiopian food. This was a really fun experience. You tear off pieces of the bread, called injera, and scoop up the food with it. Everyone uses their hands and sits around the platter. A very nice custom that accompanies this is a handwashing before and after the meal.

Moses Update:
We have been busy this last week. Because there is no guarantee of the conditions in Rwanda and Ethiopia, our pediatrician recommended that we retest Moses for everything (HIV, Hepatitis, syphillis, lead poisoning, rickets, etc.), as well as determine how well he was vaccinated. We also needed to get him tested for parasites (his diapers are horrendously stinky! So much so that the diaper pail is in the garage!). First time we went to get his blood drawn, they stuck him five times with no success. Ugh. We waited a day and went back, crossing our fingers that a very experienced phlebotomist would be there. First time was a charm and we got all the blood needed. Stool sample came back positive for giardia, but negative for any other parasites. The rest of his bloodwork isn't back yet, but we are believing for a good report.

Moses' sleep schedule is finally starting to even out as well. For a while, he was waking up at 4:00, wanting to play a few hours, and then take a leisurely morning nap. Mommy wised up after a couple of days of that, and I kept him up until his regular naptime. What a crabface that morning, but he has slept great ever since!

We're Home!

Thank you all for praying! The U.S. Embassy did give us appointments for the kids' visa interviews at 1:00 on Thursday. The consular told us to come back at 10:00 Friday morning to pick up the visas, but after some fast talking on our guide's part, her staff agreed to process them that afternoon so we could still catch our 10:00 p.m. flight. Yeah! We were all so excited to come home!

Moses again did great through the 30 hours of traveling. He slept quite a bit, but when he wasn't sleeping, he was fairly content to play with toys or the leftover spoons from the airline meals. We got into Casper at 4:15 p.m. yesterday. It was so good to see our girls! Trina finally got to "hold" Moses, and Asia was the ever-conscientious big sister. I was wondering how well Moses would do last night since we had just made a 9 hour time switch. He woke up once for about 1 1/2 hours but sang himself back to sleep and slept until 9:00. What a great kid!

Thank you all so much for all your thoughts, prayers, and support while we were gone. It meant so much to know that we have such amazing family and friends backing us up. You are all welcome to stop by and meet our beautiful son! When things get back to normal, I will try and post some more pics of our trip.

September 16, 2009

I haven’t really told many of the details surrounding our trip here in Ethiopia , because of spotty internet, but I’m going to attempt to do so now. When we left Rwanda , we felt like the hardest part of the trip was behind us; our paperwork was done and all we had to do was medical tests and an interview at the US Embassy here in Addis. Wrong. When we flew into Ethiopia , we went to the visa office because we needed to buy visas on arrival. No problem for me and Justin; big problem for Moses and all the other kids. Ethiopia does not allow visas on arrival for Africans and Moses has a Rwandan passport. Somehow, we never got that memo; I really could play the ignorance card because I had never heard that before. We had a letter from the Ministry of Gender and Family Promotion of Rwanda stating that we were approved to adopt Moses and allowed to travel with him, but it still took a lot of waiting and talking to get Ethiopian customs to let him and the other 4 kids through. One customs officer told me that he wanted to send Moses back to Kigali , but he couldn’t because he was a baby. Our AWAA guide here in Ethiopia was very surprised when we told him what happened and said that’d never been an issue before.

The next hurdle we faced was getting our kids’ vaccination records translated. They are in Kinyarwardan, and none of the translators in Addis know that language. We even took them to the Rwandan Embassy and they wouldn’t touch it because it had the Ministry of Health’s seal on it. Miraculously, the doctor who is doing their medical exams figured out which vaccines they had by the series of shots and length of time between shots and signed the vaccination form for us. Our guide, T, said this was a big deal.

Now, we are being told by the Embassy that they may not let us do our interviews tomorrow. Only problem is that we are supposed to board our plane to come home tomorrow night. All the kids’ medical results will be at the Embassy by 1:00; please pray that they will see us for interviews sometime in the afternoon. We have seen impossible things happen on this trip and know that it can happen again.

Today we got to do a little shopping and then went to a traditional Ethiopian restaurant for dinner. There was traditional food, music, and Ethiopian dancing. So much fun! Moses loved it and was mesmerized by the music. I still can’t believe how easy-going he is; he eats anything we give him (except baby food, he is on strike against that! He hadn’t ever had table food at the orphanage, so I thought he may struggle eating regular food. Evidently not an issue!), and sleeps wonderfully.

September 15, 2009

Ethiopia has been a whirlwind! Medical tests, translating documents, embassy appointments…and lots of driving around. We have seen God’s hand working in so many ways on our behalf. Tomorrow is a free day; we can’t do any paperwork or government appointments because we are waiting for results from the medical tests, so our interview at the U.S. Embassy is on Thursday afternoon. If all goes well, we plan on flying out on Thursday night. Keep praying for us!
Moses is as wonderful as ever and quite the entertainer. Justin took him for a walk this afternoon, and he was waving at everyone. Justin said that many of the people would grab his hand and kiss it, so now he sticks his hand out to everyone passing by. We are finding out that he has a stubborn streak as well, but his two big sisters have already broken us in for that so we are ready!
Sorry that we have not posted in a few days. We’re having trouble with the internet connection here, but we’ll try to post at least one more time before we come home. Asia and Trina, we love you like crazy! We will be home in just a few days and can’t wait to hug and kiss you! Be good for Grandma and Papa, and remember that Jesus loves you most of all!

September 13, 2009

Today was our last day in Kigali. Sigh. We have fallen in love with Rwanda and its people. This morning we went back to the orphanage to say goodbye and to take them a large truckload of staple food items that we purchased with donations from people back in the States (Thanks Cory and Kelly and everyone at RC!). After lunch we headed to the airport, 10 adults, 7 children, and massive amounts of luggage, all of which made it here to Addis Ababa. We haven’t gotten to see much of Ethiopia, but what we have seen is a big contrast to Kigali. Some of you may be asking, why do you have to go to Ethiopia anyway? The U.S. Embassy in Rwanda is a massive, fortress-like facility in Kigali…that only has one consular on staff. Because of that, they do not issue the visas we need to bring our kids back to the U.S., and we have to get that done at the U.S. Embassy in Addis or in Nairobi, Kenya. Since America World already has staff in Addis, it makes it the obvious choice. However, it would be so nice if the U.S. Embassy in Rwanda would just hire the necessary staff to issue visas. I’ll be writing them when we get home to petition them to do this. If you’re an up and coming adoptive parent in the Rwanda program, you should do the same! It will make your trip much smoother and less expensive.
Moses is doing great! He was fabulous on the plane, and entertained himself with two plastic spoons and a cup for most of the flight. He likes to "sing" to himself all the time and he thinks that peek-a-boo is the funniest game ever. Oh…and his infatuation with balls is stronger than I realized. He saw a little boy in the airport with a ball and wouldn’t leave him alone until he threw it to him. Such a boy!

Crazy Day

Whew! Today was a crazy, stressful, glad it’s over kind of day! We did get passports; huge deal because they don’t hardly ever expedite them. We first went to the U.S. Embassy to fill out some paperwork that will be forwarded to the embassy in Addis Ababa where they will issue American visas for the kids. A new consular has come to the embassy since the last group of adoptive families were here, and she does everything by the book (Sidenote to AWAA families: make sure you bring your receipt from filing your I-600A. If you don’t have that tiny piece of paper, you’ll have to repay that fee. So literally, that receipt is worth $670! Thankfully, I saved every adoption related receipt, but I would have never thought that was something we would need). She wanted to see all the kids’ passports, which we couldn’t pick up until 1:00 p.m. … the same time that the Embassy closes for the day. She agreed to stay until 1:30 for us. We hurried over to the Immigration office to wait for the much desired passports. Right at 1:30, we got them and made a mad dash back to the consulate. I got there first, sat down to wait for the consular and starting looking through Moses’ passport … only to realize that his date of birth was wrong! Aaack! My heart fell to the pit of my stomach! We talked to the consular about it, and she said we had to get the passport reissued. No way! There was no way we thought we’d get another passport by the end of day, and it was Friday. I didn’t see any way that we were going to be able to get on the plane to Addis Ababa on Sunday. Justin ran back over to Immigration to see what they could do. Moses and I waited at the consulate. By this time, the consular had also agreed to stay until 3:00 and finish processing everyone else’s paperwork for them to hand carry to Addis. Miraculously, Immigration agreed to make a new passport that afternoon, and just as miraculously, it got done before the consular had to leave. She was able to process our paperwork and everything turned out ok. Oh my! We all feel emotionally wrung out tonight, but we’re all so grateful that it’s over. And we even got to spend Sept. 11 on American soil (even though we would have rather only been there 1 hour instead of 5).

The picture that I posted is of our guide Nyanja and her 3 year old son Solomon. She is amazing and we love her!

Passports

Today we have been working on getting Rwandan passports for all our kids to travel home (they get their U.S. passport after we do re-adoption in the States). Normally, the passport office requires 5-10 days to process a passport, but because we didn’t get our travel document from MIGEPROF until yesterday, that timeline is impossible. We all wrote letters asking for the passports to be expedited, but it really is up to them if they want to accommodate us or not. We have to be in Addis Ababa for our visa appointments on Wednesday since our agency only gets appointments every other week on Wed. Needless to say, we were all praying they would be favorable to us (Kara was working on the tears if they needed more convincing!  ). After we explained, the lovely woman at the passport office told us to come back tomorrow at 1:00 p.m. Nyanja said that is the time that they give out passports. Though we weren’t guaranteed anything, we are all very happy that we’ll most likely get passports tomorrow.

We are discovering more and more of Moses’ personality! What a character! He is a very, very busy boy and loves to drum, sing, dance, and play with cars. We’re having to lay down some boundaries already and that makes him unhappy (like, you can’t hit your friends with a toy! What a bummer!), but for the most part he is an entertaining, sweet, and silly little boy. His favorite word is “Doh!”, which means “look” in Kinyarwandan. He points and says that a lot. He is saying mama and dada, mostly in the right context. We can’t wait for you all to meet him!

P.S. Happy 93rd birthday to Grandma Great Limmer! We love you and hope you have a very special day!

Gotcha Day

Our official, never have to stay at the orphanage again, gotcha date is 09/09/09. We were FINALLY able to get his travel document from the Ministry today. Whew! Last night when we took him back to the orphanage, he was very distraught that we were leaving. I told Justin I didn’t think that I could do that again. We gave him his first bath after we got back to the hotel, and it was a little bit of a rodeo! The water scared him. In the end, he got sufficiently clean without too much trauma.

Enjoy the random pictures from the last few days! The group picture is all of us with Veronique, the woman at the minister’s office who processes all our paperwork. She is a very important person!

Please pray for us that we can get his passport expedited and still leave for Ethiopia on time.

So … I lied. In my last post, I said that we would be able to keep Moses tonight, but it didn’t work out. The other families that arrived today were delayed by a few hours and by the time everyone got back to the hotel, the Ministry of Gender and Family Promotion was closed for the day. We have to pick up Moses’ travel document from them, take a copy to the orphanage and check out, and then take the original up to the U.S. Embassy so they can process his passport. Tomorrow, we will be doing all that, and all the families will go together. We did pick Moses up around 11:00 today and took him back to the hotel for his nap. He wanted both of us laying down right by him, and he fell asleep with his hands on my neck and his face about 3 inches away. So sweet! He is getting more and more playful each day. Lots of smiles! It was definitely harder to leave him tonight, but soon, very soon that will not be the case!

This morning Nyanja took us to the genocide memorial here in Kigali. It’s hard to even express the depth and range of emotion that I felt. I have studied Rwandan history and know all the facts about the genocide, but … well, there are some things that books and movies can never convey. One of the last exhibits is dedicated to the children who were killed. I had made it through the museum up until that point, but as we walked out of there into the gardens, I couldn’t help but weep. Not just a few tears … I was sobbing. I surprised several gardeners with my blotchy, wet face. The garden area is very beautiful and peaceful with neatly groomed hedges, flowers, and pathways. They have 258,000 victims buried there in mass graves. There are still fresh flowers being placed on the graves and signs that say, “Never forget. Never again.” Nyanja said that before the genocide, there were only 3 orphanages in Rwanda. Now there are 300. Only 29 of these are registered, and only 1 has all the proper paperwork in place (hence the reason all the referrals are coming out of Home of Hope). Now, those children who were orphaned during the genocide are having babies that they can’t take care of and creating more orphans. Nyanja did tell us that Rwanda is a much better country after the genocide than it was before. People here have had to learn how to reconcile and move on. They are committed to healing and improving their nation.

We went to pick up Moses right after that. I’m sure he wondered why I held him so tight! While we were there, the police brought in a baby that had been found just hours earlier, abandoned on the side of the road. He was days old. This is the second baby that’s been brought to the orphanage just in the three days since we’ve been here. The sisters told me this afternoon that they decided to name him Moses, too.

We are glad that the Himes and Higgins families made it safe today! It was wonderful watching them meet their children for the first time. It’ll be fun to watch all the kids interact and play together in the days ahead.

Here are some pictures from our first meeting. It takes forever to upload pictures with this connection, but I’ll do my best to keep doing it!

Today we went back to the orphanage first thing and picked up Moses for the day. His eyes got big when we walked in the room and he kept pointing at us. Good sign! He came to me without crying today and didn’t protest when we left the orphanage. We headed to Bourbon Street Coffee (it’s like a Starbucks, except they serve meals as well) to hang out with our guide, Nyanja and some friends, Torri, David, and their 9 month old daughter Ineza (she was adopted from Home of Hope also). It was so nice! So laid back! We spent the whole morning just chatting and letting the babies play. Moses was very reserved at first, but by the end of the morning he was playing with us, smiling (we didn’t get to see any smiles yesterday), and Daddy even got him to laugh a few times. He loves to throw things, balls preferably but any toy will do. We did a little more sight-seeing, fed Moses dinner and then took him back to the orphanage. He is so much fun and is such a lover! He interacted so much and it seemed he was much more comfortable today. When the sister took him from me to take him back to the toddler room, he reached back for me. Another good sign! He really loves the sisters and the nannies at the orphanage, and it is very evident that they love him just as much. One of the sisters teased me about Moses being spoiled in our family, but later I overheard her telling Nyanja to please bring more families to adopt children. They know that adoption is the best option for these kids, and we have been received very warmly by them. We weren’t sure how we would feel about spending time with him and then leaving him at the orphanage for a few days, but now I am so glad that this is how it has worked out. An orphanage is all he has ever known, and he truly loves his caregivers. This has been a lot less traumatic for him, as he’s gotten to know us over the last couple of days. Tomorrow, we will be able to take him for good, no more nights as the orphanage.

Tomorrow morning we plan on going to the genocide memorial, and then we’ll go back to the orphanage to get Mr. Moses. The other two families will come in tomorrow afternoon also.

Meeting Moses

We made it to Rwanda! The plan was that we would fly from D.C. to Ethiopia then hop on a flight to Kigali, but right before we boarded in D.C., we realized that our ticket to Rwanda was issued incorrectly. We couldn’t get a hold of our travel agent and hoped that we could change the ticket in Ethiopia. When we got to Addis Ababa, Ethiopian Airlines were extremely helpful and changed the ticket right away without charging us any fees (they are sticklers about baggage though!). Fortunately, our contact Nyanja was waiting at the airport for us in Kigali and everything worked out.

We were also able to go meet Moses for the first time, he was a little unsure of what was happening. Having toys to play with helped a lot, and he loved the truck and the ball. He would cry or start to get upset every time one of the sisters would come in the room, but always wanted me to pick him back up if I set him down. He even let Daddy hold him a little bit and threw the ball back and forth with him. Today we get to keep him for the day, and Monday we will meet up with the Higgins and Himes families and start processing his passport paperwork.

Washington D.C.

Well, the first leg of our trip is over. We made it to Washington D.C. today and even had a little time to do some sightseeing. After a few missed attempts, we mastered the bus system and walked all over downtown. We got to the Washington Monument right at sunset. Wow! Then we got to see the Lincoln Memorial. The moon was full tonight and the reflection of it off the water and all the white marble was stunning.
God has already been so faithful! Because we had such an outpouring of donations for the orphanage, we decided to go ahead and try to check extra bags, hoping that the airlines would waive the fees. United Airlines did for our state-side flight, and now we have to make the same appeal to Ethiopian Airlines. Pray that God gives us favor. Also pray that I handle the overseas flight a little better than I did today; had some moments of motion sickness, which is a very rare thing for me (except for that time in Provo, UT. Remember that, Dad? Yikes!). We were also able to test out Skype with our girls and it worked great. I think that will be a great way to stay connected with them. We love you all and are praying for you, Himes and Higgins families! We'll see you on Monday!

Away We Go!

We board a plane at 6:00 a.m. tomorrow (hope they serve coffee!) to begin the two-day journey to Rwanda. Even though it's a long trip, we do get to stop at several interesting places; Washington D.C. for an overnight stay and even a layover in Rome. We should arrive in Kigali, Rwanda at about noon on Saturday (Rwanda is 9 hours ahead of MST). Stay tuned for updates and pictures (as internet connections allow)....