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!