bodhi tree swaying

A reminder of a warmer, gentler season.

To be honest, I could keep milking my Ethiopia photographs for several years’ worth of Wordless Wednesday posts. This one is of some kids who were fishing off a pier in Awassa, not far from from the motel (more like a hostel) where we were staying. Our driver was very wary about us going for unescorted walks, but we always felt completely safe in Ethiopia. The people there are very friendly and respectful and very few people beg, with the exception of the children. The kids, to their credit, usually start by asking for pens, which they need for school. Next time I go back to Ethiopia I’m going to buy a big box of pens locally so that I can hand them out. Many of the children know a little English — enough to ask for a pen, and maybe to explain that they are very poor and need …

This is a picture of some kids I photographed in Ethiopia. This was taken in a small town south of Awassa, where another couple, Stacey and Eric, were meeting the surviving family of the two girls they were adopting. People in Ethiopia generally are very leery about getting their pictures taken. The children are an exception! Even kids who’ve never seen their picture before are natural posers!

Happy Wordless Wednesday! (If you’re wondering why there are words in this post it’s because the home page format doesn’t really favor purely pictorial posts).

This is a stained glass window from the same monastery that last week’s beetle and the week before’s priest hail from.

If you click on the image you can see a larger version.

This one’s a beetle I shot at the same church I mentioned in the last Wordless Wednesday post. He was a handsome fellow.

You can click on the image to see a full-size shot.

This was taken on a Konica-Minolta DiMage Z3, which had a fantastic zoom and macro capacity, and which I was sorry to lose when my car got flooded a few weeks after this picture was taken.

My blog seems mostly to be wordless these days! Once I clear a backlog of work that built up over the summer I plan to get back to ranting more regularly, but for now it’s nice to put something more visual out there. This pic is an Ethiopian Orthodox priest at Debre Libanos, a couple of hours north of Addis Ababa.

Click on the image to see the full-size version.

After two days staying at the Ghion Hotel in Addis Ababa and taking trips over to the orphanage to visit Maia, our newly adopted daughter, we went on an overnight trip down to Awassa to visit her birth family.

Maia is an orphan. We knew she had a surviving maternal aunt and two uncles, but we didn’t know whom we’d meet.

We traveled with a lovely young couple from Seattle, Stacey and Eric, who were adopting two sisters, Abebech and Adenech. Our driver was Solomon.

We left early on the Saturday morning, heading off not long after dawn, stopping once on the outskirts of Addis to pick up a few supplies for the road, and a few hours later to use the bathrooms at a roadside cafe.

The road to Awassa is long and straight, and it runs through scrubby savanna with …

After taking a taxi ride through the crowded streets of Addis — blue Lada taxis, modern buildings surrounded by crooked wooden scaffolding, and people everywhere being the most outstanding sights — we arrived at the Ghion Hotel, whose website claims that it boasts “specious” gardens.

We showered in our rather funky room, sitting in the tub rather than standing because the attachment for the shower head was broken, and dried ourselves on tiny towels the texture of Swedish crispbread.

The orphanage was kind enough to arrange for a ride over for us so that we could meet our daughter, Maia Bereket. The orphanage is tucked away at the end of an alley off a sidestreet that comes off of Ras Biru, and protected by heavy metal gates and a guard.

It turned out that we’d arrived on the morning that the staff were cleaning out the …

Flying into Addis Ababa I was reminded of Missoula, Montana — a place I lived in for several years. Like Missoula, Addis is in a relatively flat-bottomed valley high up in the mountains and surrounded by rounded hills covered in patches of trees. In both cases you get a strong impression of aridness in the countryside. And both cities are, in contrast to their surroundings, very green, with the tops of buildings showing through an abundance of trees.

One difference, however, was that on landing in Addis our plane was brought to a halt by a pack of wild dogs that were sunning themselves on a runway. Unable to proceed, we sat until a man arrived on a tractor and ran towards the dogs waving what I first thought was a rifle but which turned out to be just a stick. The dogs ran a little way …

Since I last wrote I’ve been to Ethiopia, adopted Maia, come back, spent a weekend in hospital (Maia had a chest infection and malaria to boot), caught up on the several hundred emails that had accumulated while I was away, and started learning how to be a dad.

In short, I’m too busy doing life to be able to write about it. I’m hoping that will change as I get used to my new roles.

Oh, and Maia’s a wee smasher!

I keep thinking that the point of a personal blog is to write what’s happening in your life as it happens, but what if what’s happening is so all-consuming that you don’t have time to write?

For the last week I’ve been caught up in a frenzy of activity because we heard on Feb 27 that we’re on for traveling to Ethiopia to bring our adopted daughter home. We’ll be leaving a week today, arriving on a Thursday (it’s a looooooong journey) and making a trip to the US Embassy in Addis with our daughter on the Monday, and flying back the following Sunday.

I have a ton of stuff to do at work — we’re launching a monthly meditation news podcast and I’m also about to launch a complete redesign of the Wildmind site (you can get a sneak preview here, but don’t be surprised if a few …

The last we’d heard from our adoption agency, our planned adoption of an orphan from Ethiopia was going to take considerably longer than originally forecast. We now think that their outlook was pessimistic.

My wife has been keeping an eye on how long it’s been taking couples who contribute to the Wide Horizons for Children Yahoo Group to get ther referrals, and at the moment the time between submission of the dossier to Ethiopia and being referred a child is holding steady at seven to seven and a half months. That would put us on track for getting our referral around March, which is only a couple of months later than originally forecast. If the seven to seven and a half months pattern keeps up, we should be travelling to Ethiopia around May next year.