The boy with the rabbit

Jolee and I are proud to introduce you to our new son, Luke Yohannes Vondra.  Luke is 13 years old from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.  Luke was born to Genet and Ayalew on June 6th, 1999.  Tragically, Genet passed away when Luke was just nine or ten months old and this started a tailspin for Luke and his Dad.  Immediately, Luke's dad turned to his Mother, Luke's paternal Gramma for help and she helped to raise Luke until he was 5 years old when she got sick and passed away. Then it was back to just Luke and his Dad.  Luke's Dad is a laborer and in Ethiopia, work doesn't come easy and after three years of struggle, Luke's Dad, (now with HIV) made the painful decision to surrender Luke to the orphanage system.  It is a great story how God intervened to get Luke from the state run orphanage system into a Kingdom Vision International orphanage.  Luke has been moved from orphanage to orphanage since this time. 

Meanwhile in America, we were living our lives, and raising our 4 kids.   Jolee and I were not looking to adopt .  Our good friends, the Davis' felt convicted to adopt two handsome  boys from Ethiopia 2 years earlier and we were happy for them but didn't feel any similar convictions.  Then one day Jolee and Kerry Davis were meeting for a ladies group and Kerry was sharing about the child they were hosting for the "Summer of Hope" project at their Harvest and Journey Churches.  Jolee remembers the absolute moving of spirit when she saw the picture of the little boy that caught the rabbit.  It was a picture of Luke, holding a rabbit that he'd run down and asking to cook the rabbit for dinner. 

Jolee was completely distracted by the story of this beautiful face, and something started that we couldn't deny.  One thing lead to another, we ended up spending as much time as we could with Luke and by the time Luke was ready to go back to Ethiopia, we knew we wanted to adopt him and have him join our family.  We talked with each of our children and each child graciously accepted the idea of sharing our life with this boy.

The rest, as they say, "is history" so let me rush through the rest of this story.  By labor day, we got the call saying we would be accepted, and that we should start working on our dossier.  On December 19th, we had our dossier approved and Luke was told we wanted to adopt him.  They moved Luke from the orphanage to a transition home.  At this home, they started to educate Luke in his english and math skills to prepare him for his eventual adoption into our home and culture. 

In March, 2012, Jolee, Rebecca, Jacob and myself flew to Addis Ababa to go through the court process.  The day before we went, we received notice that our clearance document was not correct, it wasn't anything we had done, it was a social services agency in the the Adama area that had used the wrong form.  They'd have to start over and it would just take some time.  We still went to the court proceeding and spent the week with Luke at the transition home. It was a great time but it was VERY hard to leave Luke there.  After four painful months of really no answers we finally "passed court".  That document was finally approved and accepted by the court system allowing Luke to become our son.

Now was the Embassy process.  The process of submitting our request to imigrate Luke to USA.  We finally got the call on August 27, 2012, (a year after we'd said good bye to Luke and sent him back Ethiopia) that we could set dates for going back to Ethiopia to bring Luke back home to Montana.  Molly, Michael and myself were going to go back to bring Luke home, but unfortunately Molly had to go back to nursing school and so Michael and I leave Friday morning to fly to Addis Ababa, and to go through the Embassy proceeding on September 4th.  We will be flying home with Luke, God willing, on Friday, Sept 7th.   We'll update this blog from Addis (or Rebecca will from home) as often as we can.  Please keep us in your prayers.  Thanks for your interest to even read about our beautiful son, Luke!