Our first night with Mikias

“Knowing more” would have been helpful last night as we tried to figure out a feeding schedule for Mikias. We were told at the orphanage that he was fed formula “Nan” at the level of two for his age every 2 hours. Of course, Alemu hasn’t been able to find it at any of the local grocery stores so we are off on our own. We have been creating a schedule mostly dictated by Mikias’ cries and our own intuition (if you can call it that). We were also told that he was given cereal, but we don’t know in which form. As you can see, we are filling in a lot of blanks.

We hardly slept at all last night partly because Mikias needed our attention and partly from still not being on a regular local schedule. Okay, and partly because fixing a bottle out of a thermos gets a little old. All complaints aside, we gave him his first bath today. (Funny story to follow about how to give a bath in Ethiopia) This afternoon we went to the National Museum here in Addis and saw “Lucy” (the oldest human remains). We also went to St. George Orthodox Church and learned our Ethiopian religion history. As exciting as those latter two things were, we mostly just stared at each other in shock and kept saying “we are in Ethiopia” and what did we just do.

Addis Ababa is like something neither of us has seen before. Every time we leave the guest house we stare wide eyed at what is around us. The streets are filled with people and cars and even some animals. There are small blue vans everywhere. These are the local taxis and can have nearly 20 people jammed on them. I am sure our pictures won’t do justice to what we have seen. WOW!

Tonight Alemu took us to a pizza place. This was a nice break from all the food we have eaten thus far. It is good, just different. (Joanna’s stomach is not having fun, yet.)

Okay, we are dead tired and need to go to bed. Thank you for your thoughts!

And of course, here are a few more pictures of the boy.