February 24, 2007
Babyssinia
As one part of the Ethiopian blogosphere shrinks, another springs up to take its place. Check out the right hand column of this page to see the beginnings of a new list of weblogs focused on adopting Ethiopian babies.
There are loads of them. In fact, if you go to the blog tracking website Technorati, the most popular and "authoritative" blog of any kind about Ethiopia in its directory is Owlhaven, by a mother of adopted Ethiopian babies. Then there is Babyssinia, worth mentioning for the name alone.
Ethiopia has around six million orphans, according to UNICEF. And these children are fast becoming one of the country's biggest exports. Go down to the Hilton or Ghion hotels any day of the week and you are bound to see a handful of slightly befuddled white couples awkwardly clutching on to their new Ethiopian infants. If you can't make it to Addis, go to this Family Photo Album to get an even stronger visual impression of the number of young Ethiopians leaving the country at the moment.
International adoptions have had a bit of a bad press recently through stories about the latest celebrity craze for African babies, led by Angelina Jolie and Madonna.
Personally, my experience of cross-cultural adoptions – through my own family and friends - has been 100% positive. So if you are going to leave any comments on these blogs, please be nice (see below).
Whatever your take on this growing phenomenon, it is going to be fascinating to see what happened in about 20 years time when these crowds of young Ethiopians come back again to have a look at their home country.
Posted by aheavens at February 24, 2007 6:54 AM