Home… Well, Halfway There!

Happy at home!

We have a Halfway Home!!! For those of you who haven’t heard, Children’s Home Ethiopia has had 5 children living temporarily at the Drop-In Center. These children were ready to be off of the streets, but needed a transition home prior to being reintegrated into a family. For some, there are no existing family members available or those who are available are ill-equipped for the task of raising a child. Others simply need to learn how to live within the confines of a home and with a family before they can successfully take that big step into their families’ homes. So, in many ways the Halfway Home is a re-parenting phase for these children.

For 3 months the Drop-In Center has housed CHE’s Halfway Home. This was not an ideal location for the home because of many reasons:

1. The Drop-In Center and CHE offices are located here, so space was very limited.
2. The Drop-In Center is right in the middle of the ghetto, if you will, therefore the children had direct contact with the streets that they once called home. Separation is key in the rehabilitation process.
3. CHE’s Halfway Home Parents had no privacy. Their position is already demanding, so the added pressure of living at the Drop-In Center where many children come and go all day was overwhelming for them.

Thanks to an anonymous donor, CHE was able to rent a Halfway Home in the outskirts of Addis Ababa. I visited with the children at the new Halfway Home just the other day and was blown away by how this home accentuated their changing lives. The thing that stood out the most to me was how normal their home lives now seem – They eat dinner in a dining room rather than a spare office, they can walk outside their compound and play with other neighborhood children, they sleep without the constant noise of the inner-city (busy streets, car horns, club music, etc…), and the list goes on. Also, Abazu, the Halfway Home House Mother, looked at peace where previously the stress of living at the Drop-In Center showed in her countenance.

I am excited about this new phase in the life of CHE and the lives of the children living at the Halfway Home. I expect God to use this location to heal many wounds, restore many families, create new families, and to be a light to the community of God’s redemption in the lives of broken human beings.

Studying at the dining room table

Joe and Karyn Bridges

We are really just ordinary people who have fallen in love with the people of Ethiopia, especially the children. Many stats report that 100,000 of these children live on the streets of Addis Ababa. After experiencing this firsthand in 2006, we helped start The Forsaken Children, Inc., which exists to bring lasting hope to Ethiopia through these, Ethiopia's street children. We are all about partnering with Ethiopian ministries to carry out this task and have loved doing so with the Onesimus Children Development Association! We know that The Forsaken Children and Onesimus are not these children’s savior, but we know who is and aim to direct those whom God puts in our care to Jesus. We currently live in NC where Karyn is a stay at home mom and Joe is about to be a full time student at UNC - Chapel Hill (studying social work with an emphasis on international development). The loves of our lives are our three kiddos - Jack, McLaine, and Silas!

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