Wilson’s World

Hey Everyone!

We have a great announcement to make, we are adopting from Haiti!!!

The above picture is of the Orphanage/Créche: http://www.chances4children.org/

This has been a long time in the works and is finally becoming a realization. As many of you know Jarod has two younger sisters from South Korea and loved growing up in a blended family. Therefore he always thought it would be really neat if he could adopt someday too. On the other hand, I have always wanted to adopt since High School and we are finally to the point where we are ready for a third and adoption is our number one option.

There are many children out there and when I came across information on Haiti and seeing the children that need homes our search was done, Haiti was the country! It’s unexplainable but I know in my heart that this is the country we need to adopt from. After many months of research and reading messages on Yahoo! group sites we are ready to begin our Adoption Journey. We will be adopting from Chances for Children, there is a link off to the right for their site (please check it out) through Children’s House International(CHI). We are looking at adoption costs of upwards to $20,000 therefore we will be starting some Fund Raising. This still seems so weird to me but it is very common. We will be filing our application along with $600 to CHI between November and February, also at that time we will begin our Home Study, which will range between $800 and $3,000. This is why we are starting to begin Fund Raising now and hopefully we can help offset the cost a little bit by the time our new additon arrives home, which should be in roughly a year.

Please feel free to ask any questions and I’ll answer the best I can and if you feel compelled to help us out in ANY way, we VERY much appreciate it!!

So we’ve started brainstorming on what type of Fund Raisers to do to raise money for our Adoption from Haiti. Right now we have a Promotional Fund Raiser going, it’s sort of a “background” Fund Raiser. We aren’t really pushing it but it does have some great offers, like Netflix and such. So please take a look as we will get up to $30 dollars per promotion you try:

We are also going to start working on a Halloween Party and eventually a Dinner with a Raffle or Silent Auction. In the mean time if you have any great Fund Raiser ideas PLEASE let me know!!!

Oh, we’ll be adding some Google add stuff and a PayPal button too.

The following is information about Haiti from the Chances for Children website:

http://www.chances4children.org/cfc/haiti/

Overview

Haiti has a long history of underdevelopment and political instability. Haiti is beset by widespread poverty, economic decline, unemployment, poor governance, and severe violence.

Haiti currently has a population of about 8 million people, and 1 million of those inhabitants are abandoned or orphaned children.
Haiti is a small island (it actually shares an island with the Dominican Republic) and with a surface area of just 27,797 square kilometers (km2), Haiti is second only to Barbados as the most densely populated country (306 people per km2) in the Americas. Here are some staggering facts about the situation in Haiti:

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Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere
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50% of all Haitian households live in extreme poverty using the U.S. standard of a $1 per day
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Extremely poor households have about twice as many children as do the nonpoor.
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The country’s per capita GDP, has fallen by about 50 percent to $332 in the last two decades
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Most of the approximately 3.9 million who are extremely poor live in rural areas.
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About 4 in every 10 adults cannot read and write.
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More than 80% do not have access to clean drinking water.
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In rural areas only 10 percent of the inhabitants have electricity and just 3 percent have a telephone.
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The unemployment rate is highest in urban areas and runs close to 49%
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As many as 58 percent of residents in the metropolitan area feel unsafe “often or most of the time” in their own home.
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Haiti has one of the world’s weakest police forces. There are 63 police officers per 100,000 people, less than a quarter of the regional average of 283 per 100,000 and only a third of the average for sub-Saharan African countries.

Haiti is in our backyard, but yet it is often overlooked. Many charitable organizations and international adoption efforts are focused in Africa while Haiti goes unnoticed. Chances for Children was formed specifically to focus on helping to improve lives for the children of Haiti. Haiti needs help to get it’s country back to stability. The future of the country rests in the hands of it’s current and future leaders. It is our belief that by focusing on the children of Haiti, its future leaders, we can begin to pave the way to solvency.
statistics provided by World Bank Report 36060-HT

We had a pretty calm weekend.

Friday night I had my Mom’s Game Night. We ususually, what am I saying, we ALWAYS play Catch Phrase to warm up and then move on to Pictionary and then whatever game someone brought. We always have lots of yummy snacks and some creative drinks, like Pictionary Punch. We have fun!!

Saturday we hung out around the house and did the usual home owner stuff. You know, “we really NEED to do that, but all we really WANT to do is sit on our bottoms”! We did get the lawn mowed though :0).

Sunday Jarod played soccer and then went swimming with Preston. After that he soon left for his baseball game, they lost. That doesn’t happen often but it has to. Kyla was in Crazy Mode all afternoon so she went to bed early. Preston’s obsessed with teh Cars Xbox game. Luckily we got our Xbox 360 fixed. Due to the poor construction of them, they did a massive billion dollar recall(as I call it) and fixed it and extended the warranty. Made me much happier especially since ours died 8 months after buying it!!

Other than that I talked to my padres for ever this afternoon :0). They are coming to visit here in a couple of months… finally. It’ll be fun. We’ve got a pool party tomorrow so I need to finish cleaning up the house.

Take care