An Equally Long Saturday, But We Have Compassion!

We spent this past Saturday at the International festival that Virginia Tech does every year. We are so blessed to have such an amazing international community right outside our door, literally, and to take our kids to this festival every year. This was the first year it was nice enough to have it outside for like the past 5 years, which was a double bonus because then they cram it all inside this room and then the combo of international smells can get a little (read: a LOT) overwhelming and it is VERY crowded (read: cannot walk or move and hyperventilate from claustrophobia). The pictures show just a few of the different booths: Africa, Barbados, France, Japan.

And here are just some random shots of the diverse crowd (I love seeing all the different cultures together), some guys from Ghana gettin' their street groove on, and me digging an Albanian chicken kabob:

We ended the day by listening to this awesome group of African musicians and dancers-they were amazing!

Finally, we have some GREAT news about our upcoming trip to Ethiopia!! (if the packing and scrambling around doesn't kill me first-oy!) We are big fans of the organization Compassion. If you are not familiar with them, well, you need to be. Click on the Compassion banner on the right side of my blog to go see what they are all about and how you can sponsor a child and how they are changing the world, one kiddo at a time. Anyway, we have been Compassion sponsors for 15 years and we have sponsored 5 different children, currently sponsoring 4. Last Spring when we were considering adopting and our interest in Ethiopia was growing, we decided to sponsor a little guy from Ethiopia. Well, (drumroll please...) we get to meet him and hang out with him next weekend!! He lives pretty far away from where we will be in Addis Ababa, but we have been working with the incredible Compassion folks and they will be transporting him to us so we can meet him face to face. We get to bring him gifts and spend the afternoon/evening with him. I cannot believe we have this opportunity and I have ALWAYS wanted to meet one of our sponsored children but really never thought it would happen because the sponsor tours they offer were not really in our budget. We are beyond excited to meet him and feel incredibly blessed to have this opportunity-we are arriving in Addis a day earlier than we need to be there for our adoption so that we can have that day to meet our Compassion child. We got all of our official documents today confirming and explaining how we will conduct the visit and I ended up in tears at what an amazing thing Compassion does and how humbled we are to be a part of it. Like I said, if you are not currently aware of what they do, you need to be so just click on over and find yourself a child whose life you can truly change, for the cost of dinner and a movie. You might just find your life is changed, too.