Our Trip to Ethiopia

Note: This post will stay at the top of the blog the entire time we’re overseas. New posts (if and when we can post) will appear right below this one.

We’re on a trip to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (with a few days in Paris on the way) for the purpose of bringing our little girl, Emma Nichole Asnakech Klein, back home to the United States. Spencer is staying home for this trip, and enjoying every minute with Nana, Papa, Grammie and Pop.

If you want to “follow along” on our trip, here’s how you can do that:

• Follow us on Twitter. You can check it out on the web, or to have our tweets sent to your phone, just text follow aaronklein to 40404 (in the United States). Note: Due to the time difference, you’ll want to turn your mobile phone on silent at night. Paris is 9 hours ahead and Addis is 11.
• Follow us on Facebook. Our Twitter updates should be flowing over to Facebook, although once in a while this glitches and they either never make it over there or get delayed. Also, I won’t be able to accept new friend requests while we’re gone. So Twitter is your best bet.
• Subscribe to the Blog via RSS. Internet access is VERY limited in Ethiopia, so expect most of our updates to be via Twitter. We may try out the Twitter Live Blogging plug-in that will create a post for our Twitter messages every day. But do stay tuned to Twitter if you really want to be in the loop.
• Subscribe to the Blog via E-Mail. Whatever blog posts we do manage to post can be delivered to your e-mail once a day if you subscribe.

We won’t have “perfect” access to your responses back to us. We’ll probably get most of our Twitter @ replies thanks to a couple of great friends. Please do comment, respond and tweet back, and at the very least, we’ll enjoy reading them when we return home!

PS: Can I take this opportunity to let everyone know that we won’t be sending out our Christmas letter until January this year? We haven’t forgotten you.

T Minus 3 Days and Counting

As most of you know, we’re in final countdown to leave on our trip overseas. We found out we were leaving just last week and managed to figure out a flight itinerary that got us where we needed to go at a semi-reasonable cost.

We’re in the odd situation of taking a four day vacation in Paris in order to save $6,500. I know. Please don’t feel too badly for me. That was the cost difference between flying directly to Africa on Christmas Eve versus flying to Paris four days earlier. With 120,000 Hilton HHonors points that I’ve accumulated, we’re staying for free on those three nights at the Trianon Palace in Versailles. Do not cry for me, Argentina.

After Versailles, we board an Ethiopian Airlines jet on Christmas Eve to fly into Addis Ababa. I am beyond excited about meeting my eight month old daughter on Christmas morning, and experiencing her native land in all of its beauty — and from everything I’ve heard, it’s an exceedingly beautiful country.

On Sunday and Monday, we leave the bustling capital city to travel south to the small village where she was born. We have a chance of meeting her birth mother there and we’d love to do that.

On Tuesday, we visit the United States Embassy to formalize her visa application. If all goes well, they issue said visa on New Year’s Eve and we embark that night on the 32 hour flight home to the United States with our little girl, arriving home on New Year’s Day 2010 with just a few minutes to spare.

I’m quite confident that, while on this trip, we will taste amazing French and Ethiopian food, drink unbelievably good Ethiopian coffee, see stunning artifacts of history, and experience amazing contrasts of riches and poverty. It will change and shape our lives for many years to come. I can’t wait to report back to you all the things that we have the chance to see, hear and learn.

The best way to follow along on our trip is via my Twitter feed. My posts there usually transfer over to Facebook in a timely fashion. I’m also working on some ways I can have them transfer to this blog too. But both of those methods rely on technology that may or may not be totally reliable, so if you want it straight from the source, check Twitter directly.

Just so you all know, I’ll have zero access to voice mail and extremely limited access to e-mail, especially after we leave France. After we arrive back home with our little girl and have a few days to get re-acclimated, I’ll be certain to respond to you if you’ve sent me a message during these couple of weeks.

Question: What should we “not miss” in either France or Ethiopia? What do you most want to hear about during our trip? Use the comments below to let us know!

How to Make a Difference for Orphans by Getting a Web Site for Your Church, Non-Profit or Business

My sister recently went to work for a startup company down in Southern California called Clover. They make affordable, functional and stunningly beautiful web sites, primarily focused on churches and non-profit organizations, but frankly, I don’t know why more small businesses aren’t taking a look at their offerings. It’s definitely a way to look big really fast on a tight budget.

They normally offer a prize to people who send them new customers, but until the end of the year, they’re doing a Christmas special and making the referral bonus an amazing $200.

My sister sent me this, and I decided it was simply too good of an opportunity to pass up, so here we go: if your church, non-profit, business or other organization needs an incredible web site on a fixed budget, click here to check out Clover.

If you end up becoming their customer before the end of the year, and give this blog the credit, we’ll donate 100% of all proceeds to the cause of orphan care and adoption — and I’ll match the first donation dollar for dollar.

So how about that? A chance to equip your organization with a great tool that it needs to make a great impression online, and make an incredible difference in the life of one of the 143 million orphans worldwide.

This is a total experiment, and it may result in nothing happening…but let’s give it a shot and see!

What other innovative ways can we think of to make a difference for orphans? Use the comments below to share your ideas!

Defending the Cause of the Fatherless

A verse from the Bible that is shaping and defining our lives is Isaiah 1:17 — to “seek justice, encourage the oppressed, and defend the cause of the fatherless.”  As most of you know, this has become deeply personal for Cacey and me, but we want to do more to make it a widespread mission.

Next Sunday is a very special day for us. On the one hand, it’s the first-ever Orphan Sunday, established by a diverse group of organizations supporting adoption and orphan care, including Cry of the Orphan Campaign, Show Hope, Christian Alliance for Orphans, Focus on the Family and Family Life Today.

Steven Curtis Chapman will perform a live concert, anchored by presentations from several leaders in the adoption and orphan care movement, among them Jedd Medefind, who prior to his leadership of Christian Alliance for Orphans worked in the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives and before that as Chief of Staff to my State Senator, Tim Leslie.

The other reason that Sunday is a special day for us is that two years ago, we were in Seoul, South Korea. We had just met our little boy for the first time, and we were preparing to get on a plane and bring him home to his forever family (then consisting of four grandparents, sixteen siblings and inlaws and three cousins).

So this Sunday, we’re going to be celebrating two years of Spencer coming home, while working on ways to start raising awareness about the dramatic need that exists among the world’s children. Over 143 million of them have lost a parent; some 87 million have lost both parents. Most of them live in poverty and have very few chances to succeed in life.

Whether it’s supporting foster care, domestic adoption, international adoption or supporting overseas orphanages and shelters, there is much that we can do as the richest country on earth to support these 143 million children who need help.

The Orphan Sunday live webcast starts at 2:00PM Pacific Time this Sunday, November 8 — and while you’re at it, follow @OrphanAlliance and @ShowHopeNow on Twitter!

UPDATED 11/8: Heavy load on the Orphan Sunday site. Here’s the direct link to the webcast.

Are you engaged in orphan care and adoption? If so, please share how in the comments and let’s make this everyone’s cause.

Maria’s Big House of Hope

I’ve been a fan of Steven Curtis Chapman’s music since I was 13 years old and he was just starting out. In the years since, his family became incredible advocates for adoption, bringing three little girls home from China to become a part of their family.

In fact, their adoption foundation, Show Hope, helped make it possible for us to bring Spencer home from South Korea. We are eternally grateful for their support.

Sadly, in 2008, tragedy struck the Chapmans when their daughter Maria was killed in a car accident outside of their home. She was just five years old.

But instead of pulling back in their grief, the Chapmans have redoubled their efforts in the cause of the 143 million children around the world who have lost their parents. They just opened Maria’s Big House of Hope, a home and surgery center to house some of the “least of these” children who need serious medical attention.

Check out the video above, which was put together by Caleb Chapman (their son, and an incredible musical talent himself).

» Visit Show Hope

Moving Forward for the Children

[Aaron's Note: This is a guest post from my mom, Bonnie. As you might guess, international adoption is an issue near and dear to both of us. She wrote it as a student in a college English class, and received an excellent grade for it, I might add. Enjoy. ]

The woman’s rights movement along with the civil rights movement has impacted the progression of adoption guidelines. The policies that govern adoption are constantly evaluated and adjusted as the society and culture change. As is common in society, everyday assumptions are eventually questioned. One such assumption, which has been in debate for over forty years, is the adoption practice of race matching. Race matching was eliminated in the United States in 1994 by the passing of the Multiethnic Placement Act, but still the controversy continues (Jennings 560). The consideration of one’s race should not be a determining factor in the adoption process because all children, regardless of their color, need a family. These children thrive and overcome obstacles when placed in permanent, loving homes.

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