It Takes A Village: Help Bring Our Baby Home Benefit Concert Set For May 16

A message from Anne Weiss:

Eric and I are working on adopting a beautiful baby girl from Ethiopia!!!

A fundraising concert is planned for Saturday, May 16 at St David of Wales Church, 2800 SE Harrison, Portland, Oregon….save the date!

There will be a potluck dinner at 5:30 with the benefit concert to follow from 7 pm- 10:30 pm, featuring these wonderful performers: Mary Flower, LaRhonda Steele, Mark Steele, Ara Lee, JP Garau, Adam Sweeney, Joe McMurrian, Bre Gregg, Nathan Earle and Juliet Howard of “The Get Ahead”, the Everyone Welcome Community Choir, and, of course, I’ll be playing too!

More info: www.anneweiss.com

We will be holding a silent auction at the event and are currently in need of auction items.

If anyone would like to host a fundraising concert at their home, please contact me!

Eric is also selling his beautiful hand made wooden bowls as a fundraiser. His work is incredible. Take a look at: http://www.nwfinewoodturning.com/

Please share this with as many people as you can…sometimes it takes a village to adopt a child!

Background

A little it about our baby…She is two months old. She is from the region of Gambella, which has a rich culture but also, unfortunately, a lot of extreme poverty as does most of Ethiopia. After 3 years of filling out paperwork, waiting, hoping and jumping over tall buildings with a single bound, we joyfully received and accepted her referral on March 5th, my birthday—What a birthday present!?

There are still so many more steps to bringing her home—another 7 months of paperwork and at least two round trip flights to Ethiopia, but we are bound and determined to get to our little baby. We can’t wait to bring her into our loving home and wonderful community.

We decided to adopt from Ethiopia for many reasons, but one of them is that Ethiopia has one of the largest populations of orphans in the world: 13 percent of children throughout the country are missing one or both parents. This represents an estimated 4.6 million children—800,000 of whom were orphaned by HIV/AIDS.

One of the big hurdles left in order to adopt our baby is funding. We need to raise $30,000. Adoption is tragically expensive and complicated, tragic because so many families can’t afford it and can’t take all the complicated steps necessary to adopt here or elsewhere, and that leads to many parentless and homeless children.

But adopting her means one less homeless child, and Eric and I will become one less childless family. This is our dream.

If you can donate money to help us, we would be so grateful. Just go to our gofundme page and help bring our precious baby home—http://www.gofundme.com/r3b77yc

Part of what we are raising the money for is specifically for her adoption, but another portion pays for the foster care center where she is now and for other children living there. Many of those children are unlikely to ever be adopted and would otherwise become street kids without resources, family, food or protection.

We may also be in need of baby clothes, furniture, strollers, car seats etc.

If you are able to donate frequent flyer miles to help us get to Ethiopia, that would be wonderful.

Thank you, in advance, to all the wonderful people who are helping make this dream come true.

Love,

Anne and Eric