KVI Guesthouse

KVI Guesthouse




View from our window into the courtyard of the houses below






Zenaba, the cook, with a special breakfast she made for all of us









Doro Wot, traditional Ethiopian food with rolled up injera (a sour, pancake-like bread), and the spicy (red) doro wot and non spicy (yellow) version. It is a chicken stew with lots of red onion, and a boiled egg thrown in just because. I hate to admit it, but I'm not overly fond of Ethiopian food, but I'm working on it. This, however, was the best doro wot I've had!










Since we were the last to leave the cook must have had more time...we got a special farewell drink. Yum!






I thought I would show some pictures of where we stayed - the KVI Guesthouse. Although I had seen a few pictures before we went, I still wasn't sure how this whole trip would go. I was a bit scared of bed bugs, and wasn't sure if we would have hot water, etc.

When we got there at 7:30 am we were absolutely beat after traveling for around 30 hours. I was so exhausted - I just wanted to sleep. We walked in to the main area and saw about 10 people sitting around and having breakfast. Although we "knew" a lot of them from the yahoo group, it was still a bit intimidating to be the last ones to get there. Arvid and I are also both introverts, and I wasn't sure how we would handle having people around the whole time.

Thankfully, we were shown to our room pretty soon. I don't think I took one picture of the room, which is quite ridiculous. I was pleasantly surprised, though. We had a double (?) bed, two night tables (one with a TV but we never turned that on), a large closet, small table and chair and attached bathroom with its own hot water heater! The shower actually worked pretty well, but due to an odd configuration, the shower curtain doesn't reach to the floor so when you get out the floor is soaked with water. Oh well, having that as the biggest pain was not so bad!

After a short nap (and, I'll admit, an exhausted, emotional cry where I just wanted to go home and be with the girls again) we went downstairs to chat with everyone. I have to say that the people we met were fantastic and really made our trip. The staff there was so friendly and helpful, and being together in a house full of Canadians was so much fun. We were all in various stages of the adoption process (4 families there for court, 2 picking up their kids), but all going through such similar things. At home, we don't want to bore our friends and family with hours of adoption talk, but it was so cool to be going through the same thing and to be able to talk about attachment, bonding, court, referrals, adoption agency, etc. all day long.

Aside from just adoption, though, we found we had so much in common. We all got along so well - Arvid summed it up pretty well when he said it seemed like youth camp. :-) One of the coolest times was before court, when the 2 other families who had picked up their kids already, and the 3 other families going through court with us all joined in a circle and prayed together before court. Although the outcome for us wasn't as we had hoped, I know it's due to the prayer and support of the others there that we were able to pick ourselves up and enjoy the rest of our trip.

Tim, Flora (even though we were only together for one day), Naomi, Terry, Nicole, Bobby, Jasmine, Dennis, Joanne, Gwen, Usko, Liesl, Drew, Ruth, Geoff, thanks for making it such a wonderful trip. We have been blessed to get to know you and hope we can continue our friendship across the miles. And we really do need to schedule a reunion once we all have our kids!!