Day One in Ethiopia

I am sorry it has been a few days since I have last posted. We have been busy trying to get used to life with a baby. Things have been going fairly well. Ruby's sleep schedule is a little off yet so we are working on that. As far as her health goes she seems to be doing fairly well. She is done with her antibiotics for the staph infection and all of her rashes are gone. She is eating really well and we are hoping that means she is gaining weight. Next week we meet with the pediatrician again and then the following week Ruby will go to occupation and physical therapy. Early On, an agency that works with child development is coming to assess her also. It was nice to have all of these referrals after our hospital stay. She is wearing her hand braces/splints most of the time and they seem to be loosening up her hands. She is even trying to use her hands a little which is something we haven't seen before. We continue to hope and pray that she makes strides in the right direction as far as her development and weight gain go. We also just want to love on her as much as we can.

I thought I would tell you all about our trip by explaining it a day at a time. So here is the first day...

After a long flight, we landed in the Addis Ababa airport around 7:30 pm on Thursday. After we got off the flight we went directly into the visa line where we waited about 1/2 hour to get our visas; they cost us $20 a piece. I would recommend getting visa here as it went fairly well for us. Next we exchanged some US dollars into birr. We got enough to last us a few days and then later in the week we exchanged more and it wasn't a problem. We ended up paying for all of our food, transportation, hotel, and shopping in birr. I think we could have paid for the hotel in US dollar but it would have been a little more expensive that way. Finally we went through customs (no big deal) and then got out luggage. Once we had our luggage we waited for about 10 minutes before we saw our driver, Aberra, and Milkiyas, Bethany's program coordinator. They helped us haul our luggage to the van and they took us to our hotel. It was dark out when we were driving, but it was still fascinating to look out the window and get a few glimpses of Addis.

Once we got to the hotel we made plans to be picked up the next morning to go meet Ruby. They did inform us that Ruby was back in the hospital with pnuemonia, which was very disappointing to hear. So the next day we would meet her for the first time in the "ICU"; that was scary to hear. Even with this news, it wasn't hard for us tofall asleep because we were pretty exhausted from traveling. Most nights we were wide awake by around 4am because of the time change and the first night was no exception.

Here are a few photos of the hotel and Milkiyas and Aberra. By the way, we stayed at the Dagim Millenium Hotel and were very pleased with things there.