Ready, Set, Go Exchange
When is the last time you fell in love? Can you remember the day? The time?
I don't mean the kind of love when you discover a new favorite ice cream flavor, but heart-pounding, can't stop thinking about it, invading your sleep, and affecting your ability to concentrate falling in love.
For Steve and me, it was May 1, 2014, 3:30 p.m., at CAFO Orphan Summit in Chicago, Illinois. We skipped the one break-out session we had intended to attend (one on fund raising for adoption) in order to walk around and talk to vendors. The first table we stopped at, the very first one, stole our hearts and set us off in a new direction.
As you know, we've been fund raising for a year and a half to adopt a little girl from Haiti. We've been working diligently to gather up all the necessary documents and get through the home study. To date, we've raised over $17,000.00, just under half of what we need, but that is not actually what this blog post is about.
Our journey has already taken all kinds of twists and turns we didn't see coming. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that I have no idea what the big picture looks like, and my feeble attempts to control our experience fail every time, so the only way to get through this is to let go of any and all control, pray, trust, and let God be God. I just have to be obedient.
In November of 2013, I was praying one night and felt an overwhelming prompting to start praying for our child's parents, particularly her mother. I started thinking then about her pain and the circumstances which will lead or have led her to surrender her child to an orphanage. I don't know her story and I have no idea what is going to cause her to put her child up for adoption. Perhaps she is sick, perhaps her own life will end, or maybe, just maybe, it will be because she's too poor to feed her beloved little one. Eighty percent of Haiti's orphans come from exactly that scenario.
The thought of having to surrender a child to an orphanage because of an inability to feed them cuts my heart like a knife. Being a mother of three little boys already, I cannot imagine the horror of not being able to provide for them the safety, food, and shelter they need. Even just imagining turning them over to someone else's care is devastating.
In March, we went on vacation. We drove to Florida to visit family. We had purchased the “Frozen” DVD to watch in the car on the way there. About twenty minutes in, I found myself weeping, literally, with pangs of homesickness for the daughter I will some day watch “Frozen” with, and the sister the boys haven't met. An entire movie devoted to the love and devotion of a sister who will do whatever it takes to save the other sister struck a cord with me. I spent the entire trip counting and recounting the boys every time we got in the van, constantly feeling like someone was missing. It took a while for me to realize that feeling was another manifestation of my homesickness for our daughter, whose name we don't know, and whose face we haven't seen.
All of that back story leads us back to May 1. The first vendor we talked with that afternoon was GO Exchange. Their representative, IV, handed me a necklace and said, “This necklace was made in Port Au Prince, Haiti.” At that moment, my heart jumped out of my chest, and I have yet to retrieve it! GO Exchange is an initiative of The Global Orphan Project. They are passionately concerned about the plight of orphans and families with children on the brink of becoming orphans. They are so concerned, in fact, that they are doing something about it – something amazing!
GO Exchange is hiring parents to make beautiful things, which they are then selling in the United States. The profits, 100% of them are used to work with children in the impoverished nations of Haiti and East Africa. They are involved in orphan care, teaching job skills to children before they age out of the orphanage, and to women in prisons. They have had several designers partner with them to create beautiful things such as jewelry, hand bags, silk scarves, sandals, T-shirts, hoodies, jammies...all kinds of things!
Steve and I stood there in wonder as we learned about the stories behind the products and listened to IV tell us about his personal experiences with Go Exchange and with kids in Haiti. He invited us to join with them, become ambassadors for them, travel to Haiti to meet the workers, tour the manufacturing facilities, and work with kids. We asked a lot of questions, and then we went around to a bunch of other vendors, most of whom I hardly remember at all. We took a friend back with us the next day to check Go Exchange out and asked more questions.
There is so much more than I can tell here in one post – like how they use recycled materials to make gorgeous products, buy their glue and varnish in Haiti to support the local economy, about the number of hands it takes to make a single necklace, and much, much more. Steve and I were amazed by the heart of this company, by their mission, their vision, and the quality of their work. The necklace I had been originally shown wasn't for sale, it was just a display product, but Steve asked the rep if he could buy it anyway, and gave it to me for Mother's Day. I cried a river.
We have felt for some time that once our adoption is finished, our work in Haiti will not be done. A part of our hearts will always reside there. Unfortunately, the majority of the orphaned children in Haiti, and around the world, cannot be adopted. Adoption alone is not the answer to the orphan crisis. Global Orphan Project and GO Exchange are working hard to impact families and orphans and to change the course of their lives for the better. By paying living wages to parents, they are keeping first families together, saving children from the awfulness of abandonment, the inhumanity of institutionalization, and the crisis of changing cultures.
In case you haven't figured it out by now, Steve and I have officially joined the Go Exchange team! We will be introducing their products to as many people as we can, in as many ways as we can. We'll do home shows and events, and plan to continue to be actively involved in orphan relief long after we bring our daughter home. We will receive a commission for our sales, which will be poured directly into our adoption account. So the work we'll do with Go Exchange will help support orphan relief in three ways – first keeping families together, supporting our adoption fund raising, and working directly with kids in Haiti, Ethiopia and Uganda to give them a hope and a future. (And, as icing on the GO Exchange cake, they are also working with foster kids in the US who are aging out of the system, providing job skills and employment opportunities – seriously, the goodness just goes on and on!)
Please check out our GO Exchange site – and expect to receive an invite to an event sometime soon! If you'd like to host one, that would be even better! You can find us on Facebook, and at goexwithjanelle.com .We hope you fall as madly in love as we have, and we pray God will bless our efforts as we join ranks with GO Exchange.
“The Lord works justice and righteousness for all the oppressed. Psalm 103:6
“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: To look after orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep one's self from being polluted by the world” James 1:27
For Steve and me, it was May 1, 2014, 3:30 p.m., at CAFO Orphan Summit in Chicago, Illinois. We skipped the one break-out session we had intended to attend (one on fund raising for adoption) in order to walk around and talk to vendors. The first table we stopped at, the very first one, stole our hearts and set us off in a new direction.
As you know, we've been fund raising for a year and a half to adopt a little girl from Haiti. We've been working diligently to gather up all the necessary documents and get through the home study. To date, we've raised over $17,000.00, just under half of what we need, but that is not actually what this blog post is about.
Our journey has already taken all kinds of twists and turns we didn't see coming. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that I have no idea what the big picture looks like, and my feeble attempts to control our experience fail every time, so the only way to get through this is to let go of any and all control, pray, trust, and let God be God. I just have to be obedient.
In November of 2013, I was praying one night and felt an overwhelming prompting to start praying for our child's parents, particularly her mother. I started thinking then about her pain and the circumstances which will lead or have led her to surrender her child to an orphanage. I don't know her story and I have no idea what is going to cause her to put her child up for adoption. Perhaps she is sick, perhaps her own life will end, or maybe, just maybe, it will be because she's too poor to feed her beloved little one. Eighty percent of Haiti's orphans come from exactly that scenario.
The thought of having to surrender a child to an orphanage because of an inability to feed them cuts my heart like a knife. Being a mother of three little boys already, I cannot imagine the horror of not being able to provide for them the safety, food, and shelter they need. Even just imagining turning them over to someone else's care is devastating.
In March, we went on vacation. We drove to Florida to visit family. We had purchased the “Frozen” DVD to watch in the car on the way there. About twenty minutes in, I found myself weeping, literally, with pangs of homesickness for the daughter I will some day watch “Frozen” with, and the sister the boys haven't met. An entire movie devoted to the love and devotion of a sister who will do whatever it takes to save the other sister struck a cord with me. I spent the entire trip counting and recounting the boys every time we got in the van, constantly feeling like someone was missing. It took a while for me to realize that feeling was another manifestation of my homesickness for our daughter, whose name we don't know, and whose face we haven't seen.
All of that back story leads us back to May 1. The first vendor we talked with that afternoon was GO Exchange. Their representative, IV, handed me a necklace and said, “This necklace was made in Port Au Prince, Haiti.” At that moment, my heart jumped out of my chest, and I have yet to retrieve it! GO Exchange is an initiative of The Global Orphan Project. They are passionately concerned about the plight of orphans and families with children on the brink of becoming orphans. They are so concerned, in fact, that they are doing something about it – something amazing!
GO Exchange is hiring parents to make beautiful things, which they are then selling in the United States. The profits, 100% of them are used to work with children in the impoverished nations of Haiti and East Africa. They are involved in orphan care, teaching job skills to children before they age out of the orphanage, and to women in prisons. They have had several designers partner with them to create beautiful things such as jewelry, hand bags, silk scarves, sandals, T-shirts, hoodies, jammies...all kinds of things!
Steve and I stood there in wonder as we learned about the stories behind the products and listened to IV tell us about his personal experiences with Go Exchange and with kids in Haiti. He invited us to join with them, become ambassadors for them, travel to Haiti to meet the workers, tour the manufacturing facilities, and work with kids. We asked a lot of questions, and then we went around to a bunch of other vendors, most of whom I hardly remember at all. We took a friend back with us the next day to check Go Exchange out and asked more questions.
There is so much more than I can tell here in one post – like how they use recycled materials to make gorgeous products, buy their glue and varnish in Haiti to support the local economy, about the number of hands it takes to make a single necklace, and much, much more. Steve and I were amazed by the heart of this company, by their mission, their vision, and the quality of their work. The necklace I had been originally shown wasn't for sale, it was just a display product, but Steve asked the rep if he could buy it anyway, and gave it to me for Mother's Day. I cried a river.
We have felt for some time that once our adoption is finished, our work in Haiti will not be done. A part of our hearts will always reside there. Unfortunately, the majority of the orphaned children in Haiti, and around the world, cannot be adopted. Adoption alone is not the answer to the orphan crisis. Global Orphan Project and GO Exchange are working hard to impact families and orphans and to change the course of their lives for the better. By paying living wages to parents, they are keeping first families together, saving children from the awfulness of abandonment, the inhumanity of institutionalization, and the crisis of changing cultures.
In case you haven't figured it out by now, Steve and I have officially joined the Go Exchange team! We will be introducing their products to as many people as we can, in as many ways as we can. We'll do home shows and events, and plan to continue to be actively involved in orphan relief long after we bring our daughter home. We will receive a commission for our sales, which will be poured directly into our adoption account. So the work we'll do with Go Exchange will help support orphan relief in three ways – first keeping families together, supporting our adoption fund raising, and working directly with kids in Haiti, Ethiopia and Uganda to give them a hope and a future. (And, as icing on the GO Exchange cake, they are also working with foster kids in the US who are aging out of the system, providing job skills and employment opportunities – seriously, the goodness just goes on and on!)
Please check out our GO Exchange site – and expect to receive an invite to an event sometime soon! If you'd like to host one, that would be even better! You can find us on Facebook, and at goexwithjanelle.com .We hope you fall as madly in love as we have, and we pray God will bless our efforts as we join ranks with GO Exchange.
“The Lord works justice and righteousness for all the oppressed. Psalm 103:6
“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: To look after orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep one's self from being polluted by the world” James 1:27
WOOT! Can't wait to shop!
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