A reminder that our Champagne Brunch Fundraiser at Salute e Vita Ristorante is in just **6 WEEKS** April 27th!! You wont want to miss meeting two remarkable and resilient Ethiopian women. For those of you not yet familiar with African Cradle and its founder/director, Amber Stime, we wanted to share a little of Ambers personal story. At age 2 ½ Amber Stime was watching the older children in her Ethiopian village play a game similar to “hot potato” and she was upset she wasn’t getting her turn. After complaining enough, one of the children finally gave her the “pumice stone” to hold. It wasn’t a pumice stone. It was a land mine or grenade that the children had unknowingly handed her and it blew up in little Alemtsehai’s (Amber’s birth name) hands. She was taken to a nearby hospital that put her back together again over a period of approximately six months. A year after the accident she was still having difficulties with her recovery, so she and her father moved to the capital of Addis Ababa to live with her uncle, in an effort to find better medical facilities. Her uncle ultimately persuaded her father to bring her to the local orphanage that was run by American foreigners, hoping she might get better medical treatment with their help. After some years, she was brought to the US by an American couple who had met Amber during a missionary service trip and ultimately adopted her. So, she spent her youth growing up and attending college in Northfield, MN.--a very homogenous area of the US. Her adoptive parents were pioneers of trans-racial/trans-cultural adoption back in the late 60s and early 70s. Amber’s personal experience inspired her to launch African Cradle in 1996. African Cradle is a private nonprofit agency that started by working with the Ethiopian government to find children adoptive families in the U.S. Because African Cradle was the first to place children from Ethiopia, many credit Amber as being the pioneer of Ethiopian adoption. (Since those early days, African Cradle has also established permanency for children from Tanzania, Eritrea, Burundi, Ghana, Haiti and the US.) Make plans now to join us, to meet and learn more about these two amazing women who are dedicated to enriching the lives of those in need of love, compassion, family and a home.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 23:52:37 +0000
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