That’s how much you all have donated so far to Water for Christmas. That’s awesome.

I admit, when I first heard the tally I was a bit disappointed. I went to bed last night dreaming of a well being built already. But its not my timing, none of this is my timing or my desires. This is definitely God-inspired and it’s so exciting to watch.

$3200 is a big deal, in just over a week $3200 is a really big deal. If you all are anything like me, you’re probably researching charity: water, praying and looking at your finances. Then you’ll donate. I trust you’ll do it when you’re convinced this needs to be done. Studies show the amount donated increases the longer people wait to make their donation. So I’ll run with that.

Had the pleasure of taping the Central High School students who recently danced for water. I love that idea…high schoolers taking literal and metaphorical action. You should’ve seen how excited they all were about water. It might not translate into big donations and that’s okay. Because I truly believe those high school students will be huge advocates for the world and those who are hurting as they get older. In 5, 10 years you all might know them by name and perhaps it started because they saw how simple it was to get involved in something like this. That’s pretty powerful in the gospel according to Tesi. If we can raise their generation up to live their life with their eyes wide open and their hearts soft then imagine what they could be capable of!

I’ve had the opportunity to reflect on myself quite a bit in the last couple of days. I’ve realized I really love having a purpose in life besides that of wife, mother, daughter, sister, in-law, aunt, cousin, etc. This water for Christmas campaign will last longer than Christmas for me. It’s stuck, I’m not sure I’ll be able to stop until everyone has the vital stuff I enjoy so much. So just be prepared for that. We’ll push hard for the next few weeks and after that don’t be completely surprised if you all get presents of water from me ALL THE TIME. I doubt I’ll ever be able to go to bed or wake up in the morning without dreaming dreams of water. We’ll see.

Such a relaxed Saturday for the family. Must post pictures soon. Oh, and the Quad City Times article on Water for Christmas was on the front page paper today. You can read it here. The thought of thousands more hearing about Water for Christmas is enough to make me cry…but you all know I do that too easily so that’s not saying much. Enjoy!

Man, the days and weeks are flying by here at hotflawedmama. I can hardly believe Thanksgiving is in another 2 weeks. Could it be true?

Our social worker came yesterday to do her final post-placement report. 6 months. Since this was the last one she’ll do (we are responsible for a new one every year until Tariku turns 18) I thought perhaps there’d be more pop and jazz. But there wasn’t. We raved about how well he’s doing (because he is) and she sat and listened. She left with a quick “good luck” and I offered to plan, organize and run any Ethiopian adoption weekend we might want to have in the state of Iowa. I hope that comes to fruition.

I’ve been missing Ethiopia more and more lately. My brother and sister-in-law are officially waiting for their referral and it makes me so very jealous to know they’ll be in that beautiful land before I will. I’m missing Ethiopia, and thinking about it and completely upset with myself at how little we’re doing to bring Tariku’s culture here. We dance to Ethiopian music every day and have been to an ET restaurant a few times. It’s just not enough.

Blah. In other news…Water for Christmas makes it’s print debut tomorrow. Stay tuned for that dealy-o posted tomorrow.

Oh and then there’s another dance. Made by high school students here locally. High school students dancing for water. They’re awesome and are refusing to hold their enthusiasm for “Water for Christmas” in anymore. Who can blame them?

My sister (hotflawedmama), with her friends, has been sponsoring projects that give aide to those in need of help. If you, like me, are an avid follower of her blog, she is passionate about the needs of others, but this need is big! Huge! GINORMOUS! (Merriam Webster approved!)

Water is a necessity of life, and to sit back and question what my life would be without access to a healthy supply…it’s just unimaginable. So when my sister was brainstorming about ways to help raise money to build wells in Africa, (since, like me, she is not so good at the crafty stuff) she came up with dancing! I thought, “Yeah sure I would pay to see you dance, love the idea!!” Then she says, “Oh and by the way you will be dancing too.”

Hmmmm…What wait a minute I typically only dance for my dog, but people?!? Talk about coming out of my comfort zone, because let me tell you, I do not like getting up in front of people and doing anything (I’m the shy one, by the way). But this is what this is all about right?!? Getting just a little uncomfortable? I am not even feeling a fraction of what these people feel every day when they aren’t getting any water. So I hope you enjoy the little dance, and Hunter thanks for joining me!

“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” –Winston Churchill

Good…then donate it to Water for Christmas tomorrow. So I’m sure most of you have heard of this little thing they call Facebook, right? Well someone started a “WFC” group on Facebook. That group is now up to 1000 members. By doing a little math (and I was never great at that anyway) one can figure out that if everyone donates $10 every Friday, we’ll build 2 wells. We have 6 more Fridays which would mean 12 wells and countless families.

Should you join us and donate $10 (at least!) tomorrow, who knows how many wells we can build. 42 million? I think that sounds good. So do it, seriously, check the couch cushions and do it. You’re bound to have it in the coats you haven’t worn since last winter. Check it out and then give it to WFC.

I was asked the other day what makes one choose to do something like this. It’s really quite simple for me and many other women and men around the world. Once you’ve been to Africa or held a baby in your arms who was/would’ve been affected by this; you don’t go back. You just don’t. You can’t, you won’t and you don’t want to.

4500 kids die every day because of lack of clean water. That is my Tariku. For all intents and purposes, he should be one of those statistics. But you can’t look at him and see that. Even if you haven’t been to Africa, you know a brother or a sister. Father or a mother. Son or a daughter. That is who these people are. They are a somebody to somebody.

So be a somebody to them. $20 saves an African for life. What does that $20 do for you?

That’s all I know.

Here, at Winona State University we have recently finished reading the Blue Death by Robert Morris. It is a book discussing the harmful water that, even here in America, we have. But to think that water in the United States is considered “dirty” when thousands of people die everyday because of dirty water in Africa, is crazy. So when my cousin Leslie told me about an opportunity to spread the awareness by dancing, how could I have said no?

So a week later, my friends and I gathered to gather to Shake It! We had such a fun time dancing ALL over Winona State University while explaining to people why we were dancing. So join in the Dance Party and Dance for Water!!

To dance is to celebrate life! We hear the song and feel the beat, much like our own hearts, driving us to move in ways that we haven’t moved before. The movement is sometimes beautiful, sometimes not. Yet we move, dance, feel and celebrate nonetheless because we are called to dance. And every dance should be celebrated, whether it be the slightest toe tap or the most glorious ballet.

And every life should be celebrated too, whether it be with dance, with love or with a simple, yet vital, gift of water.

1 year ago…

So today is kind of a big day around here. Today marks the one-year anniversary of our referral for Mr. Tariku Asamo Abiyu. You can read how it happened here. It’s baffling to think that was a year ago. When I think about that time my belly gets the butterflies it had then and my tears run down my cheeks like they did then. It was not so long ago that he came into my heart and settled there.

We obviously were not expecting it so soon. Just days after we turned in our dossier we were still hunkered down for a winter’s worth of waiting. We got that, though we were waiting for paperwork to go through and various other court issues that seemed to stall out the process to traveling. We originally had hopes of traveling to Ethiopia just after Christmas. Then it turned into Valentine’s Day. Soon after it was Easter. When Easter came and went we shot for my brother’s birthday (April 11) and that’s what we got. We traveled April 2nd and got back April 11th. One week, to the day, short of a year we went through the process.

When I talk to other adoptive moms who have brought their kiddos home about how much of a change we went through in that time no one can really believe it. One year, in most lives, can come and go with not much change. I can say this year was the biggest change hotflawedmama has seen in all my years. Including becoming an unmarried, pregnant college student all at one time. That was nothing compared to the last year I’ve had!

What a year, what a blessing, what a miracle. From the moment I heard Cindy’s voice on that phone I knew he was my son. I saw that picture of a scared little boy with little hope and knew we could give each other something we might not have believed in before. Hope, love of another country, of another child/mother, faith, miracles and a bond that is unexplainable yet so real.

I think about this day with mixed emotions, as I undoubtedly will on all of Tariku’s big days. I think of his Ethiopian family with love and humbling gratitude. One year ago, just a few weeks after they made the excruciating decision to give him a different life, all of our lives changed. It was official, for all of us. We would share him. Today marks the day where Ethiopian Asamos and American Klipschs united in prayer for this one baby boy who is a blessing to us both.

A real, true blessing. Happy referralvarsary my sweet boy Tariku!

So you all have enjoyed the dancing (what is up with the emails but no comments? Our dancers would love some feedback…positive of course!) This has prompted the making of another blog…a dancing blog. We have enough interest from friends of friends of friends that this way we can just post them as we go. YOU CAN TOO! You can dance, and you can spread the word, quite easily by the way. So just email/comment if you’re interested.

It’s been awesome to see the change in our dancers. They said yes as a favor to me, mostly. Then they dance and they felt it. They felt Water for Christmas take over their lives. They have emailed people they haven’t talked to in years; the professor they had in undergrad or the girl who kind of made their life really horrible for a time. And people like it. They like everything about “Water for Christmas” and how could they not?

Go to www.dancingforwater.blogspot.com. Soon enough you’ll see people from all over the country dancing for water. Tapping their toes and watching it ripple.

www.dancingforwater.blogspot.com it’s where dancing, and water, collide.

In other news…there are now t-shirts for sale! Go to www.w4ctees.blogspot.com to see them and place an order. Christa is a college student at University of Missouri in the Graphic Design program. She’s doing this for free, for water. She is awesome and talented and I love her now. So check it out and order them.

I started saying the word globalization a few years ago because it was not a mainstream word yet and I thought it would make me sound smart. Today, it’s nearly impossible to open a newspaper or turn on the television without a form of that word being used. Most of us have our own definition of globalization. To me, it means we are all connected and that every one of our actions has a rippling, exponential impact on the entire world.

Should we fear this change? Well, first of all it’s not really a change as much as us finally realizing what has always been true. Ignorance is indeed bliss, and we’ve enjoyed our bliss. But mass communication is erasing our ability to be ignorant. Ignorance is no longer a product of passivity, but is now an active choice. It’s difficult to escape the pictures, videos, and stories of injustice around the world. We cannot escape the fact that there are injustices that exist because we allow them to exist.

Lack of clean water is an unnecessary injustice.

If my neighbor across the street was dying because of a lack of clean water, would I do something? Most definitely. What about a person that lived a mile away from me? I hope so. 10 miles away? In another state? In another country? On another continent? When would I start making excuses?

When does a person stop being my neighbor? Globalization is teaching us that the answer is never.

Give water to your neighbor on another continent or tell your neighbor across the street about what is going on. And if you really want to raise awareness and have some fun, go to the Skybridge in Davenport, Iowa at 11:00pm on a Saturday night and have a dance party with random high school age kids (all of whom were intrigued by the idea of dancing for water and wanted to know about the wells being dug and what they could do to help. Hopefully, we’ll see their Dancing for Water video soon). I have to apologize to the pregnant girl who allowed me to rub her belly for the camera. We just couldn’t find a way to make it fit into the video.

“Can our prizing of each human life weaken with the square of the distance between us, as gravity does?” -Annie Dillard

You tired of the “Water for Christmas” posts yet? If you are…too bad. Slightly kidding.

Thought I’d post a few pictures of the kiddos and peeps to appease you crazies who haven’t drank the WFC juice yet. 🙂

Happy Sunday. Thanks for reading. Thanks for loving me despite (or because of) my uncontrollable passions. These are a few of them.

The kids watching their mom/aunt dance on the TV and trying it themselves.

My “Abie baby” as we say. Isn’t he beeeeautiful?

I forgot to tell you hotfawedmama (the blog) and (the person) got a new look. 🙂

This is just my entourage I run with…all the Klipschs and family who went to watch Andy play last night.

And the other Water for Christmas people who spoke to hearts last night. And moved people to donate a pretty good amount of money for the few hours we were there. It’s catching. Like wildfire. Like wildfire that changes and saves lives. It’s so rad.