Education

First of all, thank you to everyone for the well wishes for our first home study appointment. D and I both think it went really well. I wasn’t 100% sure what to expect but it was actually a very good experience. Our social worker is super nice and I am glad we will be working with her. We basically spent the entire two hours just answering her questions. She asked us how we met, about our courtship (if you can call it that), our strengths and weaknesses as a couple, what we see as our role as parents and other questions like that. But we also talked about adoption in general and how we will communicate with our child about his/her adoption. D and I had briefly discussed some of that but it was good to make sure we were on the same page. I had always assumed that we would talk about it from the beginning and would tell our son/daughter the story of their adoption. It’s not going to be a taboo subject in our household but something to celebrate. Our child will have a story, it will be the story of how our family came to be, and I want our child to know about it. Part of the conversation was about ways to incorporate the child’s Ethiopian culture into their daily lives, which is very important to us. That made me think about how D and I have been trying to educate ourselves about Ethiopia and have learned a fair amount thus far.

I thought some of you might be interested to know some of those facts as well.

*the capital city is Addis Ababa (it means new flower) *the official language is Amharic *the major religions are Christianity (mainly Orthodox Church) and Islam *Ethiopia is one of the world’s oldest countries *Ethiopia was the original source of the coffee bean *the literacy rate is 42% *Ethiopia has only 1 medical doctor per 100,000 people *there are more than 3.8 million orphans in Ethiopia

Being a huge fan of the Olympics and someone who enjoys running, I had always been familiar with the Ethiopian runners and the success they have had at long distances. But I didn’t know anything about the history including recent studies that claim the present-day vicinity of Addis Ababa as the point from where human beings migrated around the world. Very cool.

D and I are obviously trying to soak up as much information as we can. We are going to have our first encounter with Ethiopian food this weekend as we will be going to the Blue Nile. I will give a full report next week.

I will leave you with a shot of a bumper sticker I just ordered from Etsy. I am super excited to proudly put it on my car.