Thank You!!

We are pleased to announce that with your help we have reached our Holiday Project goal of $20,000!  Mandie Doak, our Holiday Project coordinator, is now in Ethiopia helping to prepare for the celebrations on January 6th.   Each child at Layla House will receive a small gift and a traditional outfit and the staff will receive gift certificates to help with their own holiday celebrations.  The whole compound will enjoy a festive day with a traditional meal.  Plans are being made to provide goats for the meals at our partner orphanages; most of them have far fewer resources than Layla so meat for the holiday is a special treat.  The families of our sponsorship students will receive extra money and the students themselves will get small gift bags with toiletries and treats that a volunteer group brought over in November. 

Our Ghana adoptive parents met and exceeded their holiday goal this year!  The celebrations there happened on December 25th and we hope to put some pictures up soon.  We work with several orphanages and have a number of families enrolled in our Family Preservation Programs.  All of them were able to have extra-special holidays because of the generosity of our parent group and their friends and relatives.  

Half of the money collected each year for the Holiday Project supports our ongoing humanitarian projects such as Opportunity House, our facility for special needs kids and the new outreach program in DireDawa.  We are so appreciative of the adoptive parents who choose to give back to their childrens' birth countries through remaining loyal to AAI.  In addition, we have many other friends and supporters who donated generously to help us reach our Holiday Project goal.  

We hope you keep following this blog as we have lots of exciting plans for 2011!  

With sincere gratitude,

Susan Poisson-Dollar
Director of Development
on behalf of the staff and children of AAI