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Day 2 - Kechene

As a part of Project Ethiopia, some of the Red Letters team traveled to the country this week. Today is day one of our seven day trip with Children’s HopeChest to scout out orphan communities in need of help.

Our escort, Suleiman Bayu, is a young man of maybe 30 with a heart as big as Texas and a commitment to orphans that is nothing short of heroic. 

Today Suleiman is taking our group of 6 to the first orphanage on our itinerary — his.  The New Hope Center for Children and Handicapped is about 2.5 hours west of Addis in a rural farming community called Ambo.  The Center serves 67 orphans on site and another ~120 with special needs in surrounding areas.  To meet the needs of an orphan community of this size we’re going to have to go beyond traditional options for orphan care like adoption and individual child sponsorship.  Suleiman knows this all too well having grown up as an Ethiopian orphan himself after his parents died in the great famine of 1984. 

Community-to-community sponsorship is the reason we’re in Ethiopia this week.  In this model a church or organization supports a full orphan community at least three important benefits : 

1) Family.  When you leave an orphanage, the kids don’t ask for food but they do ask you to remember their name.  Children under the stewardship of a community-to-community sponsorship can experience the blessing of family without being formally adopted.  It is about stability, continuity, loving them through letters and personal visits, listening to their hopes and dreams, and walking with them through life.  This is the difference between knowing someone and knowing about them. 

2) Scale.  Traditional adoption and individual child sponsorship are critical elements of solving the poverty crisis but the gift of family does not have to be relegated to only those children we can take home. Today there are 4.8M orphans in Ethiopia.  According to the US State Department only 2850 (.06%) have been adopted in the last 5 years and this is the strongest rate among African countries.  Not only are more orphans served initially with the community-to-community connection but also more are served over time.

3) Holistic.  Serving orphans in Ethiopia begins with meeting their basic needs for survival but lasting change requires as much focus on thriving as on surviving.  Thriving requires an investment in education, vocational skills, and help transitioning them from orphanhood to productive adulthood. 

In the next 9 months, our goal is to connect 10 churches with 10 orphanages in Ethiopia through Tom Davis and Children’s HopeChest.  None of us can solve world hunger by ourselves but you can make a difference in the lives of 67 orphans living in Ambo, Ethiopia.  Talk to your church about helping out and pray God would open doors, change hearts, and renew our/your commitment to ‘the least of these.’