Burden Me

The past couple weeks have seen more than their share of drama.  In a nutshell, we learned that our fingerprint paperwork for our Chinese adoption ended up at the US Embassy in Ethiopia.  It took almost two weeks of constant emails and phone calls to the USCIS, the NVC, Senator Boxer, Senator Feinstein, and Congressman Campbell, but the issue finally got resolved.  Of course, Amber did nearly all of the legwork.  She even had to drive to the USCIS office in LA and spend a day giving stone-cold office workers the guilt-trip showing them pictures of our little girl who can come home to us if only they would DO THEIR JOB.  It worked.  The right paperwork reached Ethiopia days later.  Awesome!

Now for the real topic of this post.  We want you to burden us.  Burden us down with donations to hand carry to Ethiopia.  Donations to meet real needs of real orphans.  We will hopefully be traveling to Ethiopia in a few weeks, and we plan to take as much cargo as we can handle with us.  It's way cheaper and way more reliable to be a "mule" and pay the extra luggage fees to get donations to the orphanages and transition home than it is to ship donations.  So this is a call for donations to take with us.  There are some specific needs that have been expressed by our agency:

• TOOTHPASTE (we already have over 150 toothbrushes)
• DEODORANT
• HAND SOAP
• CLOTHES PINS
• BOY'S UNDERWEAR (sizes 6 and under specifically)
• TODDLER-10 YEAR OLD UNDERWEAR (boys & girls)
• SIZE SMALL SCRUBS FOR NANNIES ("5 for 10" stores have deals)
• BABY WIPES
• SOCCER BALLS & PUMPS (for the street kids)
• BABY BOUNCER SEATS

It would be a great problem to have if we had more donations than we could possibly manage.  If you're interested in dropping off some donations, please drop me (Bryan) a line so we can work out the details.