Meeting Maya in Ethiopia
John and I adopted our daughter from Ethiopia in March 2008 when she was 27 months old. We live in New Hampshire.
We thoroughly enjoyed our journey to Maya which included going to Ethiopia to meet her and bring her home. I read a lot of books about Ethiopia in an effort to imagine what awaited us.
But nothing can really prepare you for the bare poverty that presents itself. Seeing with our own eyes a man with no legs struggle down a street (without a wheelchair), or a young child tell us he’s hungry while we’re stopped at a traffic light, or a mother with a malnourished child in her arms begging us for food changed how we see the world. And that was just the city. Once in the countryside we saw people trying to scrape a life out of the barren soil. Children were unsupervised because their mothers were working in the fields or collecting water or wood for cooking.
However, we were even more caught off-guard by the genuine generosity and love that we encountered. As we have grown as a family, we have also grown as citizens of the world. We have found our calling, which is to help ease some of the suffering experienced by the disenfranchised and impoverished people of Ethiopia.
So what is Maya’s Mercato? Its a website born last Christmas when the frustration of trying to find meaningful gifts for friends and family weighed heavy on me and I lacked any oomph to get the job done. You see, I am not at all a shopper but when a light bulb went off over my head, I felt truly inspired.
What was my light bulb moment? It was the notion that all my Christmas gifts should benefit Ethiopia in some way. This idea energized me to get the keyboard hot with internet searches and I wracked my brains to remember where I saw a great product on someone’s blog. When I told my friends on Facebook, I got several other moms asking to let them know what I found. An idea was born, and now I was intrigued…
I found companies and organizations selling various products that in someway or another benefit Ethiopia, but then I got to thinking, wouldn’t it be useful if there was one central place that pulled all these vendors together so that whenever you wanted to buy a gift that actually helps someone in Ethiopia, you could do it with ease and speed. Thus, the concept of a market, or in Ethiopia, a mercato, was born.
(Incidentally, this website is purely a labor of love and I do not receive any remuneration for promoting these vendors. Please enjoy and visit often.)
