Our Leap of Faith

By Ellie G. and Gabriel C.

Yared is the perfect addition to our family. He's a joy to be around and his smile lights up every room he enters. His progress already has been staggering. To imagine life without him now is inconceivable. We feel like the luckiest family in the world!

The series of events that led us to adoption and WHFC are similar to many people's stories. Our choice of the Ethiopia program was more a leap of faith. WHFC had not yet quite begun their Ethiopia program. Our interest was piqued in a newsletter that described how loved and cherished the Ethiopian children were even in the face of such dire circumstances.

After our informational meeting we spoke with Vicki Peterson who had been to Ethiopia to set up the program. She talked enthusiastically with us for a half-hour and showed us some photos. We got more and more excited and by the time we had driven back home to Vermont from the Waltham office we had pretty much made our decision.

Our experience in adopting Yared from Ethiopia was mostly problem-free. Waiting, of course, was hard but all the time frames given by WHFC were actually shorter than projected. This was miraculous considering we were one of the first families going through the program.

This is a testament to not only the experience and expertise of WHFC but to Tsegaye, the director of Horizon House in Ethiopia and his wonderful wife Yelfalem. We were deeply moved and impressed by the dedication of these 2 people to help and save so many children.

Not enough has been said about Yelfalem. She has extensive experience working with children both as a teacher and as the principal of a school. She set the loving tone and the professional attitude. She kept us all laughing!! We forged a wonderful friendship that will last a lifetime. They were so open and loving and ran Horizon House with that openness and love and a level of professionalism we didn't expect. The nannies they hired were all skilled and attentive to the nine babies that were there when we arrived. They were so embracing of our entire clan (Ellie's father and his fiancée joined us) especially to our 4 1/2-year-old daughter Freesia.

We arrived and were ceremoniously introduced to our new 9 1/2-month-old son, Yared. (Yared is the saint of music in Ethiopia.) He was beautiful, alert, joyful and a little skinny. Not emaciated, as we had sometimes feared. He smiled a lot, which was a big relief since in the only 2 photos we had of him he had a very serious, if somewhat sad, face. That they loved him was obvious in the care and attentiveness he (and all the other babies) received.

Let me talk for a moment about the Ethiopia we grew to love. Most of us have little knowledge or info about this country other than the pictures in the media. We know of its poverty, its civil war, and that AIDS is an epidemic. But what we do not know, nor could from the media, is of the dignity, openness and gentleness of its people. We were impressed everyplace we went. The beggars in the street, though everywhere, were polite and treated with compassion and kindness by other Ethiopians.

People we met on Ethiopian airlines on our way there became our friends, visited us in our hotel and took us around. People we met out and about in Addis Ababa (the capital) were genuinely curious about our adoption of Yared, wanted to make sure it was all on the up and up and informed us of our great responsibility in taking one of their Ethiopian treasures to America. When they understood they were friendly and wanted to know about our lives in the States.>

Just learning a few Amharic (the Ethiopian language) words did wonders in forging our relationships with people. The greeting "Salaam" was always met with a similar greeting and often a bow. Our attempts to say a simple "thank you" (in Amharic a not so simple "amasagnalehu") were laughed at and greatly appreciated. Most people spoke English so luckily we didn't need to get by with our meager grasp of their language.

Yared is the perfect addition to our family. He's a joy to be around and his smile lights up every room he enters. His progress already has been staggering. To imagine life without him now is inconceivable. We feel like the luckiest family in the world!

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