Throughout the trip, she told us stories about growing up in a family that valued ministering to the poor and underprivleged, especially those in Haiti. She told us about the numerous mission trips she had experienced, and introduced us to her one-year-old “son” Isaac that she was planning to adopt from one of the orphanages in Haiti. Because of the long adoption process, she had been able to visit him several times, but knew it could be years before she would be able to bring him home to America. [I find it so sad that the process is so difficult, involves so much paperwork, and takes so long... there are so many wonderful parents here longing to adopt internationally. I have heard that the wait to adopt from China is up to six years now.]

Fast forward to January12, 2010. Amanda was actually IN Haiti at the time of the earthquake on yet another missions trip. You can visit her blog and read about her experiences here. For the short version, Isaac and the orphans survived the earthquake, but their building was destroyed and all of the adoption paperwork that had been in process was lost. Amanda had to come back to the U.S. without her baby boy, not knowing what would happen to him and all the other children she had come to know and love throughout her visits. I am so so SO very happy to report that because of some heavy lobbying by a senator, Isaac was granted Humanitarian Parole and was able to fly to the United States to be with his mama. I can’t imagine the joy that must have filled Amanda’s heart knowing that her baby was safe and coming to live with her forever! I am so happy for you Amanda and so proud of everything you are doing to continue to help the people of Haiti.

To watch a quick video of Amanda and Isaac’s homecoming click here…

I had seen these little figurines on someone else’s blog over a year ago and fell in love with them! I checked out Etsy, and only found a couple people who custom paint them and they had quite extensive waiting lists. I placed my order anyway, and they finally came right in time for Christmas. I set my little doll family on the window ledge right above my kitchen sink… they make me sooo happy when I look at them!

I also need to say thank you to all of the people who have e-mailed expressing interest in sponsoring a child in Uganda through Children’s HopeChest. I have to admit I have not done a very good job following up with these people, and making matches with them and the children. So I’m going to post photos of the kids that I actually have profiles for (there are many more available… these are just the ones I kept from the open house.) My mother-in-law already volunteered to sponsor the sweetest little twin boys whose pictures I was going to post…I really wanted them to be able to be sponsored together so thank you Laverne! For those of you who have contacted me, let me know which child you’d like to sponsor and I will mail you the profile so that you can go ahead with the sponsorship. Thank you so much!

Peter–five years old

Florence–six years old

Vicky–four years old    [look at that POSE!]

Regina–five years old

Anna Grace–six years old

James– nine years old

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I will be out of the studio the rest of this week enjoying many fridgid hours in the hockey rink and celebrating the new year. Have a great last week of 2009 everyone!

~Ria

I would like to introduce you to Regina. She is approximately five years old (isn’t it sad that they don’t have a record of birthdays in Africa? Most times when you ask a child how old they are, they have no idea what you are talking about.) If anyone is interested in sponsoring Regina, please e-mail me  at info@rialeephotography.com and I will give you all of the details.

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It’s been awhile since I’ve posted any of my work, and I’ve got lots to share! Here are some more images of those sweet boys I first showed you a couple of weeks ago. I just love these brothers.

Have a great day all!

Ria

And this photo displayed on our front desk… it stopped you in your tracks. So powerful.

Look at all these beautiful children!

My dear friend Brandi helping me look through the hundreds of profiles of children available for sponsorship at Bukedea. It was SO good to catch up with her! She lives in Florida and had to buy a sweater especially for her trip to freezing Fargo. And… she is now writing a book! Can’t wait to read it… she is an amazing woman.

Brandi and me with my new bloggy/photog friend Laura!

While looking through all the profiles, someone handed me this one, and as soon as I looked at it, I KNEW I had seen that sweet little face somewhere before.

I immediately ran to my computer and looked up my photos from Africa, and sure enough. There she was.

I’d like to introduce you to the beautiful little girl that our family is going to sponsor, Mary Charity. I loved her when I spotted her at Bukedea, and I love her now. Isn’t she precious?

I can’t even explain how much it means to me to have been able to meet our sponsor child. I can’t wait to start a relationship with her.. to write her letters and send her gifts, and  provide a better life for her in Uganda with our sponsorship dollars.

I will be posting photos of other children that are available for sponsorship in the coming weeks. If you are interested in sponsoring “one of the least” of His precious children, please let me know.

Purchase aprons and paperbead necklaces to raise funds for the children of the Bukedea village in Uganda Africa. We are asking the people of Fargo, Moorhead and surrounding areas to, in essence, ”adopt” this village and their children as our own. The profiles of all of the children needing sponsorship will be available at the open house events, along with the aprons and necklaces. We can’t wait to see how many children will receive a sponsor this weekend. This little girl says…. “please help.”

Now you have a chance to help her, and thousands more just like her.

If you picked up the last issue of On The Minds of Mom’s, (hopefully you have!) you read about Lindsay Erhardt, an amazing woman with a heart for orphans. She is actually the person that led me to travel to Africa last April.

This weekend, Lindsay and her friend Rachel Antoine, along with Children’s HopeChest, (the organization that led my trip) are holding apron and bead parties to help raise money for a carepoint  in Uganda. This village is called Bukedea, and it was one of the places I visited while in Uganda. There are currently 256 orphans looking for sponsors.  Two representatives from Children’s HopeChest will be coming to help host these events (one of them is the super fun leader of my trip, Brandi whom some of you got to know by reading her blog while we were in Africa.) I am so excited to get to see her again!  These parties are going to be  open-house house style and you will be able to purchase  aprons and authentic Ugandan paperbead necklaces to help raise funds for these children.  You will also be able to see the children’s faces that need sponsorship-to keep their tummies full. 

This is Bukedea.And this is their current kitchen.

Bukedea is an identified orphan care point.  That means it is a village of hundreds of children who have lost their parents from many reasons such as war or HIV/AIDS and the older children are responsible for raising the little ones left behind.  They are starving.  Currently, if a meal is provided somewhere in their area, kids will walk miles just to get to it.  By building a kitchen and providing sponsorship to kids, meals could be provided at this kitchen up to twice a day! All proceeds from aprons and necklaces from this weekends’ parties will go towards building a kitchen for these orphans.  The kitchen will cost $10,000.

We are looking for men and women in the Fargo-Moorhead community to be sponsor and be advocates with us for these kids.  If you are interested in helping build an online community to organize future fundraisers, trips to visit the kids, etc, please contact Lindsay or Rachel.  If you are considering sponsoring a child from this village, we will have an on-line community with updates of the kids and Bukedea and an opportunity for us (all the sponsors) to stay connect by blogging.  Sponsorship includes: 1. Praying for your child  2. Giving $34 a month  3. Writing letters and e-mails  4.  Visiting!!! (this is not a requirement, just a fun possibility).

I am happy to announce that there will be two parties held up at the loft! There will be one this Friday night from 5-8pm and Saturday afternoon from 1-4pm. There are also many other opportunities to attend an event throughout the weekend. Please contact Lindsay at 701-552-1203 or tlkenya@yahoo.com.

This is it. It’s your opportunity to make a difference for orphans. Consider attending a party, or even better, consider becoming a sponsor for one of these precious children. Will you help?

Started by Sam Henry and his wife Wendi, HopeMongers follows a micro-giving philosophy which recognizes that ending extreme poverty is not something that any of us can achieve alone. But each one of us CAN make a difference, and HopeMongers has made it really easy for us!

Remember Katie Davis? As you’ll see in the video, she has added a 14th little girl to her family… sweet baby Patricia. This video was taped just a couple of weeks ago, when Sam and a group from Children’s HopeChest were in Uganda on a mission trip similar to the one I took in May.

Katie’s Vision for Bukaya, Uganda from HopeMongers Cooperative on Vimeo.

Find a Project. Give $10. See the Impact.

Click HERE.

Head over to rialeephotography.com to take a look!

Also… The FEED THE FORGOTTEN program has now raised over $15,000! WOW! In case you haven’t had a chance to give but still want to, now is the TIME, because we have released $2500 in matching funds… so every dollar you give will be doubled!

“Often we set out to make a difference in the lives of others only to discover we have made a difference in our own.”
                                                                ~Ellie Braun-Haley author

To celebrate I am going to give away a free children’s session to one of my lucky blog readers! Just leave a comment on this post and I will randomly choose the winner around 11am Monday morning! In honor of the big day, I am posting ONE YEAR photos of little “S” [yes...ANOTHER little girl whose name starts with "S"!]… she was just so yummy. Her auntie gave her this fabulous Anthropology dress for her birthday… I absolutely LOVED it!

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And, I need to say a big thank you to everyone who has donated to our Feed the Forgotten project. As of yesterday, we had raised over $8000, which translates into 57,000 meals for starving orphans in Uganda. Thank you so much! For more info on creative ways to GIVE… click HERE.

And finally, I would like to let you all know about a program that is being kicked off TODAY, June 1, 2009 called “Feed the Forgotten”. There are people DYING in Uganda right now. There are children who’s bellies are hungry and aching. There are mamas who are too weak to stand and babies begging to be held. There are people trapping termites hoping for food and eating dung in helplessness.  YOU CAN DO SOMETHING…

For $0.14, we can (and WILL) feed someone a meal of posho and beans. (Posho is cornmeal, which is filling and beans are protein).

Take this in for a moment. . .

$0.14 a meal

$2.86 for 20 days

$1 per FAMILY

$20 feeds a family for 20 days.

Now is YOUR chance to make a difference.

Children are starving… THESE VERY CHILDREN that I photographed in the Teso Region of Uganda are the some of the children that will be receiving these meals.

Join us and Children’s HopeChest to FEED THE FORGOTTEN!!!

(CLICK HERE TO GIVE NOW) (note: please write FEED THE FORGOTTEN in the notes section)

Thank you to all of you who keep coming back and reading my blog, leaving wonderful, encouraging comments, and for caring about all of these things that are so important to me!

But Shannon wanted to do more than just tell people about Katie. She wanted to do something to help her and specifically the over 300 children that her program serves.

In her words:

 Katie and the others she works with are striving to meet the physical and emotional needs of these kids, but there always seem to be more and more that need her and she can’t be with them all day every day. So I started thinking that a small doll to love and care for and hug might help fill some of that void. I knew I couldn’t make very many on my own but figured I might find a few crafty friends to do some. I emailed Gwen at Amazima and she was very gracious about the idea! The catch is…what one child in Amazima’s program gets, they all get. Which means, as much as they’d love 10 or 20 dolls, they couldn’t accept them unless there was enough for everyone. That’s 350!!

I’m blown away! She has told me that the response has been overwhelming and they have almost 50% of the dolls they will need being made and the goal is to have 350 dolls made and sent to Uganda by Christmas. Thank you Shannon, friends of Shannon, and Etsy for taking on this project. Here is the link to her blog… in case you’d like to help make an Amazima Doll too!

http://lyneya.wordpress.com/

Katie first came to Uganda in 2006, and returned in the summer of 2007 to teach kindergarten for one year. She lived with a man named Pastor Isaac and really immersed herself in the culture and even learned the “Lugandan” language.  She tells such funny but heartbreaking stories about the children she taught… about how they used to LITERALLY eat their pencils because they were so hungry. She said they kept the pencils at school so they wouldn’t get lost at home, and at the end of each day when she went to collect them, some of the children said they didn’t have them. When she asked what happened to the pencil and they replied that they had eaten them… she of course thought that they were really just trying to sneak them home. So she asked them to show her their pencils and sure enough… they brought up just the metal part with the eraser on the end and the entire wood part had been chewed off. Can you imagine being so hungry at school that you have to EAT your pencil?

During this year, Katie recognized a great need for some kind of sponsorship program to help the orphaned children in Uganda pay for school fees. So she decided to do something about it. Without knowing the first thing about starting a non-profit organization, Katie began Amazima Ministries International. Sponsors in America pay $300 a year and this covers school fees, a uniform socks and shoes, school supplies, two hot meals every day, and all necessary minor medical care for one child. Her program is currently sponsoring 350 children! On Saturday mornings all of the children in the program come over to Katie’s house for lunch, fellowship, baths and bible study and get to leave with a bag of food for their family.

And…. as if the Amazima program was not enough, in January 2008, Katie became the mother to three little girls. You can read that story here.  Since then, she has added ten more girls to the family each with a different heartbreaking story. It makes me think of what would have happened to these children if they didn’t have Katie, and how many more there are just like them in the world that don’t have a “Katie”.

In addition to her sponsorship program, being the mom to 13 and foster mom to many, Katie also has projects such as putting together birthing kits (she has actually had to deliver babies in Uganda… and once it was quintuplets!) Because so many newborn children and mothers die during the child birthing process due to simply lack of hygiene, she has decided to put together kits and for around five dollars can fill a gallon zip-lock baggie with a large plastic sheet for the mother to lay on, soap and rubber gloves for anyone assisting the mother, a sterile string for tying the umbilical cord and a new razor blade for cutting it, and a snuggly new receiving blanket to wrap the new baby in. She also spends her days in the village finding orphans who need sponsorship, visits with families of children in her program and has recently started a new feeding program for the a group called the Karamajong that serves up to 1500 children twice a week.

Ummm… have I mentioned? Katie Davis is 20 years old.

The newest addition to their family…Grace.

Katie’s blog reads like fiction… as in.. this can’t be real… this can’t be the life she is living. But, she will assure you that it IS real, she is living in the center of God’s will for her life, and she has never been happier. She doesn’t want any of the glory to go to her because she truly know that she is doing GOD’S work.

“So people tell me I am brave. People tell me I am strong. People tell me good job. Well here is the truth of it: I am really not that brave, I am not really that strong, and I am not doing anything spectacular. I am just doing what God called me to do as a follower of Him. Feed His sheep, do unto the least of His people. People tell me they miss me because I am so far away. And here is the truth of it: I’m not. I’m right here, right here on this same Earth as you just doing what I can to make it a little bit better, a little bit more like His kingdom.”

She is one of those people that makes you want to DO better, to BE better, just by being around her.

On Tuesday we drove the four hours back to Jinja and stopped for lunch at a very cute cafe called The Source. They even had “chicken crispers” on the menu… and they tasted ALMOST like they do in America! What a treat:)

Our first stop after lunch was to a place called Sister Agnes’. (I think that was the name.) There are almost 50 orphaned children living and going to school here. They all seemed to be well dressed (better than we had seen anyway) and very well behaved, but almost in a solider-like way which was really sad to me. It seemed that “Agnes” was quite controlling and the kids weren’t allowed to be kids. They did perform a very cute skit though about the good samaritan that made us all laugh. The boy under the blanket is supposed to be a donkey.

The children spend many hours making these paper bead necklaces to sell to raise money for their needs. As soon as we arrived they ran to get them and laid them out for us to look at. We even were taught how to roll the paper to make a bead!

Our stop at Agnes was very quick, as we had promised the children of Rapha that we would stop back for a visit that afternoon. (We had been there on our first day also.) This is Arthur… the amazing, wonderful, tender man that runs Rapha orphanage and school. His wife Ruth founded the program, but sadly passed away in 2008 leaving him a single father to their children as well as all of the children Rapha serves.

There are over 50 orphaned children that live at Rapha Village, and they have a school for over 250 other children (Rapha Primary School) as well as pay for schooling (school in Uganda is NOT free like it is here, and most families cannot afford to send their children to school) for another 50 children.  Total, they provide education and food to over 350 children and that number just keeps growing. Most of the orphans that live at Rapha are sponsored by Brandi’s church in Florida, and now Rapha Village is being considered as a carepoint.  The beauty of the carepoint sponsorship model is that by providing these children with one meal a day and educational resources, it enables them to stay with family members. By having a carepoint that receives sponsorship money, the burden on the families is lightened and the family members are less likely to give up their children. They may even have resources left over to buy something “special” for their child since the neccesities are being covered.   It’s almost always preferable for children to stay with family immersed in their culture than to be placed in an institutional setting.

Funds from Brandi’s church enabled a new well to be dug for Rapha… their previous clean water source was a long 4 mile walk away.

On our trip, Brandi was able to give them money from donations to start building a new kitchen!

A sweet little girl carrying water (the walk to the well is still a little ways away and up quite a steep hill on the way back) … as I took this photo she put her arms up to balance the can on her head, but as she walked away she put her hands down and kept walking just balancing it on her head!

Some of the girls on our team made balloon animals for the children, which they of course thought was the BEST.THING.EVER!

How sweet is this little girl?

Tomorrow I will post about one of the most amazing people I have EVER met…stay tuned.

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More on Facebook.

These children gathered early in the morning to wait for our arrival which wasn’t until about 3 in the afternoon. I love the little decorations they had hung!

It is not uncommon for young children to care for their siblings all day long. This young girl was in charge of her two little sisters… who knows how far they had to walk just to get there. One of the difficult parts about coming home is trying to get my own kids to realize how truly lucky they really are. There are so many things here we take for granted… things like a garbage system so we don’t have to smell burning garbage all the time, safe water coming out of our tap so we don’t have to walk several miles and carry water back for our family, meat that has already been prepared for us to purchase so we don’t have to cut off a chicken’s head and pluck it’s feathers to cook it, hospitals that actually provide all of the supplies that you need so that you don’t have to go to the pharmacy just to purchase a needle and sutures for your stitches. Ya know… those things. Life in Africa is hard… but yet they are still so filled with joy!

Some of the girls teased me that it must have been somebody from Fargo that donated “long-johns” to a child in Africa.

During the meal we noticed this young girl crying… we never did fully understand what made her cry that day, but we did find out that at that both of her parents were dead and she was left to care for her three younger siblings by herself. She was NINE YEARS OLD. Heartbreaking.

Here is a photo of our team along with our the Country Director for Children’s HopeChest, Joseph. He was the amazing man that navigated our travels, kept us on schedule (tried to anyway) and kept us safe! We were all laughing because we had asked an older Ugandan boy to take our picture and we could tell that he was aiming the camera quite high and most likely photographing only sky. He managed to get us in the cornerof this photo though!

And… I have shown you a photo of an African sunrise, so I thought I should also show you one of an African sunset. It was breathtaking!

Photos from our last couple days in Africa coming tomorrow!

The hut type building is where we went to church.

The older siblings here are so helpful in caring for their younger siblings. This little boy had just gotten done eating a mango from the mango tree and his hands were all sticky and his brother walked him over to a little bush and started wiping off his hands with the leaves.

Later that day, we went to visit a hospice for babies who have HIV/AIDS. Many of these babies mother’s died during childbirth, or their families can’t provide the medical care they need while they are so young. Their goal is to return them to their families after caring for them for about 3-4 months.  For some babies, it is just a place for them to be loved before they pass away. They have served over 275 children and of those over 60 have died.

It was their dinner time while we were there so we got to help feel them.

I still have photos from Monday that I will need to post when I get home. Today we will making the four-hour journey back to Jinja and visiting two more orphanages there. Then we get to stay at a very nice hotel on Lake Victoria…I’m very excited for that!  Wednesday we will travel to Kampala to do a little shopping before heading to the airport and boarding the plane for Amsterdam and then home. Only two more days until Diet Coke!

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More photos on Facebook.

Look at this BEAUTIFUL baby… her name was Barbara and we all loved her!

We were also able to give out many of the donations we had brought over from America. Between the nine of us, we collected 997 toothbrushes, 320 tubes of toothpaste, over 4,000 pencils, over 1000 pairs of underwear, and suitcases filled with clothes shoes and toys.

I think this sweet little girl really liked her new panties!

After many hours visiting with the Tesa Widows and the orphans we got back in the van… and were exhausted from standing in the hot sun all day and not having eaten, but still needed to go visit a child-headed household[that is where there are no parents, and the older siblings are left to care for the younger siblings.] The children’s roof had blown off their house, and Children’s HopeChest is going to fix it for them.In order to get there, we drove the van in as far as we could, but then needed to hike way into the jungle {the other team members would laugh at me for saying that since to them it was a little walk}, but to me it was quite the trek. This photo makes it look peaceful and serene… but seriously…we were WAY in the jungle! 

And how cool is this? The president of Children’s HopeChest, Tom Davis posted about me on his blog a couple of days ago! You can click HERE to see it. Exciting stuff.

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Click here to see more photos from Day Three on Facebook.

More to come from our experiences in Soroti tomorrow. Since I don’t really have a way with words, if you want to read more of the “stories” from our trip, check out our team leader Brandi’s blog by clicking here.

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More photos on Facebook.

It almost doesn’t look real… but I assure you… I took it this morning!

We’ve already had a very full day today, visiting two orphanage/schools in Jinja. One is already sponsored by the church of our team leader Brandi. It is an orphanage to around 50 children, and also a school to several hundred who treated us to some wonderful singing and dancing.

We also visited a site that is a possible available sponsorship with 32 orphans, but room for much more. They just need the funding to be able to add more children. Here we dropped off some of the donations that were brought along by the team, such as toothbrushes, pencils and clothing.

It is around 2 in the morning here… and I haven’t slept much the past few days, so I am going to tuck myself in under my mosquito net and try and get some sleep! Here are some photos of the day…

                 [to see more photos from today...click here.]

Here is what happened when we stopped our van on the side of the rode for a few minutes today… it started with just this one little girl looking at us. Then she realized we were taking her picture and slowly they began to multiply. The really love seeing us “white people”  and getting their photos taken. Everywhere we go theyshout out “Mzungu, How are you?” Mzungu is their word for white person. We ended up giving this group handfuls of M&M’s.

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I also need to send a very happy birthday to my two sweet boys who turned 10 today! I hope you had a great day boys (and ate something at Space Aliens for me!)… miss you tons!

Leave it to me to break out the candy without asking mom first. When I commented on how much they seemed to be enjoying their suckers she replied, “that’s cause they’ve never had one before!” GULP. She assured me that it was okay… but I still felt really bad!

We tried to get a shot of them walking down the sidewalk together, but “E” always left “K” in the dust!

And check out the sneaky action in this series… so, so cute… and so glad I caught it! [In case you can't tell, "E" is stealing the yellow sucker right from "K's" mouth, tasting it and giving it back.]

And… the countdown is on! Only FIVE more days until I leave for Africa. I fly out on the 28th. If you are willing to donate items for me to bring to the children, they will need to dropped off (I could also pick them up from you!) by Monday. Thank you to those of you who have already donated! I can’t wait to see the faces of these children when they see what we have brought them. The three main things we are trying to collect are toothbrushes & toothpaste, kids’ underwear of all sizes, and pencils & plastic sharpeners. So far we have over 300 toothbrushes and over 1000 pencils… but would love to have many more to share!

The amazing woman who is leading this trip has a wonderful post on her blog about various prayer requests we will need during our journey. She has traveled to Africa before and has thought of so many things that would never have entered my mind. I can’t even tell you how helpful and encouraging she has been to me as I have been preparing for this adventure… usually freaking out asking her millions of questions.  Thank you Brandi for calmly walking me through this process. I can’t wait to meet you in person! [And thank-you for adding to the prayer requests "PEACE for those traveling alone"... I know that one is for ME!]

Only 26 more days until I leave for Africa. I don’t think it has really even set in that I am actually going. Maybe after I start my shots and medication on Monday it will become a little more real. It has already been kind of a rollercoaster ride of an experience. The girls from our community that I was going to be traveling with decided not to go, so I was faced with the decision of whether or not to back out, or continue on this adventure with complete strangers. I am convinced that something very special will be happening with this trip and still feel very confident that I am suppose to go. So… that means I will be traveling to Amsterdam all by myself, and meeting the rest of the team there and flying into Entebbe Uganda with them. You know that saying that says “do something everyday that scares you”? Well, I think this trip should take care of that for me for atleast a couple of years. While I am extremely nervous about traveling alone, the long flights (from Minneapolis to Amsterdam is 7 hours and from Amsterdam to Africa is 8 hours…please pass the Xanax), finding my team in the Amsterdam airport, and making our way through the poorest parts of Africa, I also have an unexplainable peace about the whole thing.

If you’d like to learn a little bit more about the CEO of Children’s HopeChest, Tom Davis (I actually got to have dinner with him back in February to talk about this vision trip to Uganda!) you can find his blog here. He is such an amazing, giving, self-less man who is using his life to literally change the world. He is also a very busy family man who lives in Colorado with his wife and five children!  (He also has two older daughters that were adopted from Russia that are married and live on their own.)

Tom and Children’s HopeChest are also closely tied with the Red Letters Campaign which is a blogging community that is working together to reduce extreme poverty.

               “Whether you’re passionate about caring for the world’s 143 million orphans, preventing HIV from eradicating a generation of Africans or providing safe drinking water in Central America, you’ll find friends in the RLC community.  We’re here to equip you with tools and connect you with a network of like-minded people and partners that enable you to be an active part of the solution.”

Click the image below to check out the Red Letters Campaign website.

That’s right folks… I’m headed to Africa. Anyone that knows me, knows that it has been a dream of mine to visit and help orphans in Africa~~so when I was presented this opportunity, I couldn’t help but say yes. Even though I’m terrified beyond belief, I really feel like this is a journey I need to take. I will be going along with three or four others from our community as well as a team put together by Children’sHopeChest on what they call a “Vision Trip”. Children’s HopeChest currently has sponsorship programs in Ethiopia and is looking to expand to Uganda. So we will be touring the area visiting orphanages that are in need of sponsors, visiting and loving on the kids [and you can bet that I will be taking photos as well]. We are hoping that 400-700 children will be sponsored as a result of this one trip.

This video explains why I’m going so much better than I ever could…

I would love for you to be able to share in this journey with me… I am hoping to be able to bring along my laptop and blog my experiences from there, but I’m not sure how the internet situation will be. There are several ways you can get involved in this project…

First, I will be collecting donations to help pay for the costs of going on this trip. If you want to help in this way, you can send your donation to the studio at:

505 N. Broadway Suite #205

Fargo ND 58102

Attn: Project Africa

Secondly, I would like to collect small items to be able to bring to the children in the orphanages. This would include things like small toys, balls, crayons, bubbles, washcloths, toothbrushes, child spoons, light-weight shoes, socks and underwear, onesies or t-shirts or pajamas. Any of these items can be dropped of at the studio (before April 24th please… I’m gonna have to figure out how I’m gonna pack all this stuff!)

Third, I’m gonna need your prayers. I’m feeling scared, excited, hopeful and a million other things. When I learn more about the itinerary I can let you know better what specific things to pray for. But for starters… let’s just say that you can pray that this city girl who doesn’t really like to be outside or dirty in any way, and only eats beige colored food will survive this nine-day trip! Also, I’m pretty sure it is against the law to take any of the children home with you without the proper paperwork… so pray that I don’t end up in African jail after trying to steal a beautiful little baby and tuck them in my suitcase!

Fourth… Here’s a BIG one. Will you consider the possibility of sponsoring a child in one of the orphanages I will be visiting? For just $34 a month you can change a child’s life. The neat thing about Children’s HopeChest is that they help facilitate an actual relationship with your sponsored child. You will receive information about their circumstances, family of origin, orphanage, town, and country. You will have the opportunity to write to your child through the CHC website as often as you’d like, as well as send hand written letters if you wish. One of the coolest parts about CHC’s sponsorship program is that they coordinate yearly trips for the sponsors to actually visit their children and orphanages. Can you imagine coming along with me to Africa to visit the poorest of the poor? To bring joy to children in a country where one meal a day is considered a luxury?

It is my wish of all wishes that enough of my blog readers would commit to sponsoring a child that with your help the rialee photography blog community could sponsor a whole orphanage. Get involved. Get your kids involved. It will change the lives of kids in Africa… but it will change your life too.

In the coming days I will be posting more ways that YOU can make a difference…