Children in Ethiopia !

I wanted to do a post on the children in Ethiopia !! All the children in Ethiopia are SOOO beautiful and FULL of life!!It was such an amazing experience to be able to work with the children in our programs. We were able to get to know them one on one and hear their stories and to see how Ethiopian children live... and they touched our hearts sooo deeply.... again hard to explain words but I will try to give a glimpse....

CHOIR has wonderful programs. One that we got to work closely with is Kid's Hope. The name stands for what the program is about "giving hope to children". This is an after school program of 50 children between 6-16. They come to the centre after school to learn (there are teachers) and to play and spend time with the other children. They love to play ball in their courtyard.

These children have all lost parents,siblings, some had only a few weeks before we were there and were new to the program. Some are living with grandmothers, aunts and uncles... some are living only with siblings in child led households.

This is called beyong poverty. These children most of time have no food. Our program provides them with one hot meal a day which is sometimes all they have. Our first day in Ethiopia, we spent most of the afternoon doing home visits.... There were a translator with us and they were updated the children's files with their caregivers and we were able to see their neighborhoods and meet their families. It is not possible to describe in words what we saw that day. I will always have a hard time talking about these visits as they were REAL. These were REAL children living in REAL poverty.... not something on TV.... children that were SOOO happy, wanting to learn, wanting to play, wanting us to hold their hands, wanting us to bring them to CANADA........ Our heart broke often during the week, seeing what we were seeing... but the one thing I got from visiting these children's homes was that THEY ARE SOOOO RICH in hope, courage and just wanting to be just what they are CHILDREN. They are kind, generous, always helping others, alway wanting to learn and some of them were telling us that whey were older, they would open a program like Kid's Hope to help other children that are in need like they were. These families are truly greatful that the program exists and that it is giving their children a place to go and learn and be the children they were meant to be!

Our heart broke a few more times during the home visits when families would offer us the ONLY food they had. As a sign of respect, we were advise to eat the food that they had prepared just for us which was really hard to do. They were SOOO happy that we did and kept saying how blessed they were to have us in their homes... It was really eye opening to see the richness in the Ethiopian culture that day and to see how to them EVERYONE is family !

Here is a video of the children while we were doing home visits in their neighborhood. They would all follow us from one house to the other and they all LOVE cameras, we found that out pretty quick.... In this clip, the children were preparing the beans for a grandmother that was going to make us coffee. Enjoy...


In the next video, we had let the children use the camera and they were taking video of the other children. They had SO MUCH FUN doing this..... I will always remember their laughs that day, it was just one of those moments that I will never forget from my trip to Ethiopia. The children don't have much yet they are SOOOOOOO happy all the time. They stole our hearts...Our lives were definetly CHANGED by the children in Ethiopia!