Congratulations to Joanie of Austin, Texas. Joanie purchased 5 raffle tickets and won the scooter drawing last night at the orphanage fund-raiser. I spoke with her today and she is ecstatic with joy over her win. She already found a shipping company and they will be picking it up and bringing it to her next week!
We had a great time at the event, and I want to thank everyone who came out and supported the effort to save these children in Ethiopia. All in all, and I am guessing here, I think there were around 250 people who showed up, which is very cool!
Thank you, and congratulations Joanie. Happy Scooting!
LJ Urban has always been about seeing a need and stepping up to meet it. Sometimes there are needs too big to ignore outside the world directly in front of you, and you have to use your passion to do some good for people in another place.
You may have read recently on the blog about a new orphanage for children who were literally sentenced to death by their parents. The children come from a tribe in Ethiopia with very superstitious beliefs and we are going to rescue these kids and help give them a future. I visited there last month and have been writing about what we’re doing to help out.
Here is a video we put together that tells the story about how this all came together.
We’re having an event at Old Soul to help raise funds for these kids and we want you to come! Today there are 10 kids who have been saved and we expect that there will be many more over the next few months. It’s an understatement to say that your help is needed…the orphanage is a month old right now and is in desperate need of support in every way.
Word is starting to get out that my wife and I are moving to Ethiopia to run the orphanage I keep mentioning here on the blog. We simply could not sit by while children were being killed over there without stepping up and doing something about it. So sometime in the next month we are going to be moving our family to Jinka Ethiopia for a Sabbatical.
But before you jump out of your seats… Don’t worry, LJ Urban is still going to keep rolling here with Micah at the helm but at a much slower pace. As I am sure you all know the market has slowed significantly and its a good time to slow things down and wait out the storm. I will be explaining all the details as well as keeping you all up to date on our progress as we wind up our American life here to embark on something completely new. As for the blog we are going to keep posting updates from Ethiopia and so it will be a sort of developer – orphanage blog for a while. Sound fun?
The thing with blogs is that there really are no rules and so we just kind of do what feels best and with this change in our lives it feels to good to keep blogging here. It’s been quite a ride for those of you who have been with LJ Urban since we started and I hope you will all stay tuned as we go on the biggest adventure yet!
In the mean time head over and check out the site for the orphanage and see what we are up to.
After returning from Ethiopia some incredible people who heard the story called up and offered to donate their time to put together a website and video about the project. The site is still not quite done but you can follow the link and see the 95% finished version. The video on the other hand is done and very cool. Make sure you are sitting down before you watch this.
We have been brainstorming about fun ways to get people involved in the effort and will be announcing them both here and on the orphanage site soon. Stay tuned…
Many of you read my post a few weeks ago about the kids in Ethiopia and their situation. I have to say that I still think of them every day. I wonder if they are going to be ok and how things are going to work out. I hope that there is some way to set up an adoption plan for them and that families here in America and other countries are willing to step up and invite them into their homes. It’s odd to step outside your world and see another reality and another struggle up close. In some ways its like an irreversable change inside you that you can not shake.
Not trying to make a big point here just saying that its good to see outside your world now and again.
Also, exciting news…Vanessa who many of you know because she worked with LJ Urban for several years is on her way to the orphanage right now. She is going to be there for a month helping get things in order. I will update you when I hear more from her.
I was talking to my friend the other day and he made a funny analogy that I wanted to share. Do you remember when you were a kid and you played tag? You probably had a safe zone like a car, the mailbox or maybe a tree? Well it seems as though the banks, the small businesses, homebuyers, are all just chillin in the “Safe Zone” hugging the tree and very few if any people are playing tag. Now is a very good time to start playing again.
So if you are an avid LJ Urban reader you may have noticed a bit of a tone change in the writing here for the past few weeks….Didn’t notice? Oh well. Anyhow…I have been gone for a bit and can’t wait to tell you about where I was, but I think its best if I start at the beginning and take you all the way through what has gone on since this month started. Because when the month started I had no idea any of this was even going to take place, it all just unfolded like a crazy movie.
Steve (a good friend of mine who I have known since I was a young kid) works at a Church in Roseville called me to tell me about a some interesting news he had heard. He said that he had received word that there was a group in Ethiopia who had been visiting a tribe in the south called the Karo and had learned of a terrible ongoing tribal practice, basically the tribe believes that the Karo people are pure and need to be kept that way and that some of the babies who are born are not pure and need to be killed. So for the past 200+ years they have been killing many of their babies by throwing them in the river with their hands tied or by putting them in the bushes to die.
There is some good news in this though. The team that was there went to the tribe elders and made a proposal. You let us take the children off of Karo land and you will not have to kill them. The elders agreed and in the first two weeks 9 children were taken from the tribe and brought into a little town called Jinka. [Read more →]
Yesterday I was driving home and about a block from our house there were several kids crossing the road. They looked like they were playing follow the leader because everyone had the same swing to their arms while they marched in a sort of formation. I watched them for a minute then had this strange thought. What if that were a bunch of adults instead? What if we all decided to play follow the leader around town on our lunch breaks? Sounds a little off, you might even have a few people staring at you thinking you were a crazy. But why not? What is it in us that makes us loose our sense of play when we get older? I am sure it has something to do with the fact that we start to understand more about responsibility and the gravity of what we have to take care of in our lives weighs heavy on us and makes play seem impossible. It’s like we were told that growing up makes it so that we need to spend a lot of money to have fun.
I still have not been snowboarding this year but normally try and go once every year. When I do go there is almost no way to get away from spending at least 150 bucks between gas food and what seems to be the ever climbing price of a lift ticket. I don’t know about you but that is a lot of money to me. But yet when someone asks me what I like to do for fun I would most likely say that I like to snowboard. So think about that for a second, once a year I get to go spend a bunch of money and an entire day on my grown up fun. Next time someone asks me I think I am going to say that I like to play follow the leader. You can play it all year, there is no planning and driving involved, it’s free and best of all if you cut loose and allow yourself to enjoy I bet it would be pretty fun. I am going to try it today. Anyone up for a game of follow the leader?
Vanessa Dunne wanted to make more friends for her girls who were 2 and 4. So she decided to ask the the folks at Pipeworks (the Climbing Gym on 16th ST) if they would let her use their exercise room for free every week. Dance class was born. Now 3 years later Vanessa shares the class with two other moms and every Tuesday at 11 you can hear as many as 30 moms and kids in the exercise room singing and dancing their hearts out. What Vanessa did was start showing up and told a few friends, she didn’t need to spend a bunch of money or write a 10 chapter charter she just started small and built a big community. Communities that are based on simple small concepts that are understandable work best. It’s the ones that you have to explain for 20 minutes that don’t get anywhere.
UPDATE: They now meet on Mondays at the McKinley Park Library.
