Ready to come home

Well, it's official. We are ready to come home. Today, we visited Gladney Foster Care -- where the babies come from the government orphanages before they are placed with families. Abraham lived there for all but two weeks of his life until this past week! It is a lovely, clean, bright, sunny facility and Gladney has employed 15 orphaned girls from the government orphanage to be caretakers. These young women are wonderful and this represents a new lease on life for them -- because otherwise, they get $500 from the government when they turn 18, are turned out to the world, and have no real direction in terms of how to begin an adult life.

Afterwards, we had a great lunch at Top View Restaurant where we looked over the whole of Addis and watched the afternoon rains move in. The air there -- high up on mountain over the city is cleaner and it felt good to breath fresh air.

We then headed to the U.S. Embassy, where we received our final approval . . . and tomorrow we will have Abraham's Visa to enter the United States. Such a simple thing and yet so precious . . .

Finally, we returned to the cocoon of our room, collapsed onto the bed and proceeded to watch movies and order room service. We just didn't have the energy to go out for the evening . . .and last night was a doozy -- and truly remarkable so we'll cover it in blog form when we arrive home.

Tomorrow is lots of pool time, playground time and packing .. . . and we board Ethiopian Airlines Flight 500 at 10:15 p.m. for the journey home. We land Friday a.m. at 8 and we can't wait . . . especially our poor, darling, fabulous boy Connor . . . who is done with taxis, restaurants, the adulation of strangers and so on . . . Cheow (bye) for now.

Chris, Elizabeth, Connor and Abraham :-)