Her Name Was Lola

I've been putting off writing this post, mainly because I'm still thinking through a lot of things. But basics:

I spent just under two weeks in Mekele, volunteering at an orphanage called Lola Children's Home. It is filled with twenty-eight of the most adorable, cheerful, and in so many ways, typical kids on the planet. They sing and joke and make messes and love playing with cameras and shriek and whine when things don't go their way. They love kisses and hugs and can always use more attention. The older ones go to school during the day and there's a kindergarten at the home for children of that age, while the ones younger than that have activities that they do with the caretakers during the day. And every child is HIV positive. Thanks to medical advances, that diagnosis is no longer the death sentence is used to be, and if you didn't know that about the kids in advance, you probably wouldn't ever guess.

There are eleven staff at Lola, and you can tell that they all love and care about the kids so much. The director extraordinaire, Abebe, was an orphan himself and started off as a social worker at a well-known orphanage in Addis before moving to Mekele a few years ago to start Lola. You can tell watching him with the kids that he loves them and what he does.

My main conclusion so far has been that spending time in Mekele, at Lola Children's Home, was so good for me. Selfish as that sounds (and is), being there, and seeing other things here in Ethiopia have made realities out of things that were previously only abstractions to me. I won't claim that now I want to adopt an Ethiopian baby or that I now recognize my life mission is to move here permanently and take care of the poor, needy, and sick, because neither of those are true, but I am trying to figure out how my experiences here will impact decisions I will make in my life. Right now, I'm still not sure. I'm also not sure that me being there did any significant good for the kiddos- I think it would be both presumptuous and erroneous to assume that spending a few days with them made any lasting impact on any of their lives, and I don't know if having a long string of adults who are only in their lives for a short time is really all that beneficial. There are a lot of questions I'm still wrestling with and I'm not anticipating finding answers to them anytime soon. 

That being said, I am so so so so so glad to have been able to spend that time there and get to know the kids, even just a little bit. And, if you're interested in learning more about Lola or sponsoring one of these delightful chilluns, thanks to the wonders of the twenty-first century and the world wide web, you can visit http://www.lolachildrensfund.org/, read the occasionally updated blog, or find them on facebook. Amazing!