Where is he from?

Well it has been a week today since, "The Call". In the meantime, it's set in we're going to acutally get a new son and brother. Our children were very excited and when we arrived home from California, my daughter, Marissa, made pictures of our new son/brother and put them all over the house. I find myself looking at the fridge wondering who is that child on the fridge? Oh, wait he is ours. It is a little different getting use to. We have picked a name, I think...... We plan on calling him Adam Girum Frasier. We wanted to first see what his Ehtiopian given name was, thinking that we could just use it permanently. So much has been taken from him already. If it had been a name we thought he could live with we would have kept it. As much as we love Girum, we felt that it might be a source of teasing on the playground later. Thus we have moved it to the middle and given him his Fathers middle name.... Adam.

We have had many people ask when we will be picking him up. When we spoke with our case worker at CHSFS she told us that the courts in Ethiopia would not hear his case until April 15th. Three months after his abandonment. Very rarely do they see cases heard earlier than the three month mark.

The three month rule in Ethiopia states that if a child is abandoned by his/her parents that the courts will wait 3 months for family to claim the child. This rarely occurs because it is a crime in Ethiopia to abandon your child and if caught you will be thrown in jail. This is the reason that CHSFS told me that they have never had a child reclaimed by the original family after an abandonment.

Many people have asked about the details surrounding his abandonment. To this we would like to say that the story of how he was abandoned will be for him to tell as he chooses. If Shawn and I disclose the details of this story, we will deprive Girum the opporotunity to share the story in a way of his own choosing. We will say however, that Girum had a mother that loved him and left him well-fed where someone could find him easily and get him to somewhere safe. We hope that we can raise him to understand the love and the sacrifice that his mother made to bring him into the world. Living in the United States it is perhaps difficult for many of us to understand the extreme circumstances that so many expectant and new mothers live in, and the incredible decision they make to leave their children, hoping they will be found and that someone will offer them love and a good home. From the beginning of this journey, I have felt the silent prayers being offered by a mother across the world and know that the Lord has sent us to answer her prayers. We understand that wanting to share all parts of his story would be so easy, but we ask for your help in this matter in keeping this small part of his story his own to tell.