People are good

When we started out on this journey, we stepped off without much sense of what it would take to bring home a little boy from Africa.  Obviously, we know a lot more now; having studied, conversed and visited Ethiopia.  But last January, we simply took a leap of faith, believing that our trust in God would lead us to a way.

Our visit to Ethiopia last month gave us great hope that the prospects for Tommy's physical and speech rehab are quite good.  Most of the difficulties with the court and embassy process in ET have gotten smoothed out.  Now we just need to get back over there and retrieve our boy.

Among the issues we've been wrestling with is the cost.  With agency, processing and travel, it will cost around $32,000 by the time we get him home.  And, we've already discovered that, while our health insurance is quite good, it won't cover all the expenses of getting Tommy well.  In fact, the therapies he needs are the ones it specifically limits (like speech rehab, OT & PT).  So, we're expecting our 2010-2011 costs to be somewhere in the $50,000 range.  For most everyone I know, especially us, that's a ton of money.  Fortunately for us and Tommy, we've had lots of help.

• Brittany's Hope Foundation gave us a Special Needs grant
• Holt International agreed to reduce their fees by almost half
• Our parents donated a big pile of 401k money and 160,000 frequent flyer miles, which got us from America to Europe and back
• A bunch of friends and family made incredibly generous contributions by mail around Christmas
• Out of the blue this week, a lady Jenny works with offered to help us fundraise by inviting people to her restaurant/bar and donating a portion of their profits at the end of the night.
• A very, very close friend made a gigantic contribution last week that took us over the top for our agency and travel fees.

So, while we're counting our travel as 100% funded, we're still accepting peoples' contributions to help pay for medical costs because we think they'll be substantial.  While we're being very careful to not appear to be, or actually be, greedy, and we don't want to take advantage of anyone, we do want to remain open to accepting help from anyone who feels moved to help Tommy.  And, we definitely remain both grateful and humbled by the generosity and love of our family and friends.