Leaving on a Jet Plane....

Tomorrow, Lud and I will get on an airplane with 3 others headed for South Asia to live on a college campus for 4 weeks. We are very excited about this trip! Our Father has blessed this trip in numerous ways already and we can't wait to see what He has planned for us. We will be taking an Introduction to Mandarin class and hanging out with college students. It is a great opportunity to get to know them and share our culture with them. There are several friends that Lud has made on his past trips, and he can't wait to be with them again. This will be my first trip to Asia, so I am looking forward to experiencing everything Lud has come home sharing about. I don't think I'll be able to update the blog while I'm there, but I will email weekly updates to friends and family.

Please be in prayer for us. Join us in asking our Father to prepare the hearts of the people we will meet. Pray for us to meet "people of peace" who are open to getting to know us and our hearts. Like Lud always says, please don't just pray that we will be safe or have fun. Having fun is guaranteed when we're filled with His joy, and He will keep us safe. The sole purpose of this trip is to reach the unfulfilled hearts in this other country. Pray that they are open and willing.

Thank you so much for your prayer and support!

*If you're our close friend, you know where our exact location will be. We prefer not to disclose it on the internet.

Rafiki

I mentioned in my last post that I traveled to Ghana last year. Our primary purpose in going was to love on and serve the orphans at Rafiki Satellite Village. The Methodist Church of Ghana provides some funds for the orphanage and a pastor serves as the director of Rafiki. The orphanage currently is the home to 23 precious children. They live in houses with house mothers, receive three good meals a day, attend school right on campus, and most importantly are taught about God through bible studies and worship services. The school also serves children from the local village down the road. I had the privilege of teaching some first graders while we were there, and I had so much fun! I developed a slow, slightly English accent while teaching in order to bridge the language barrier and they taught me a few words in their native language. I can't tell you how much these children radiate the love of Jesus! For the past year our friends, Katie and Clint, have been living at Rafiki helping them develop a sponsorship program for the children. Rafiki really does not have enough funding to keep all the children cared for in the right way. They are also hoping to serve more children at the orphanage and build more classrooms for the students as they get older. (Right now they have kindergarten through second grade.) They can't do that without some help.
We currently sponsor a boy named Kojo. He is athletic, funny, and mischievous! I got to meet him and spend time with him while at Rafiki. It was so wonderful getting to know the child we sponsor. We also get to communicate with him through notes on the website. We love getting to know him better through these notes! My favorite line he's said is "If you don't come to Ghana soon, I will flush your head down the toilet!" It's a joke among the kids at Rafiki that they will flush your head down the toilet when you're in trouble. Hopefully we will be returning to Ghana sooner than later!

Kojo (in front)

I'll leave you with a few pictures of these wonderful children. If you would like to help out Rafiki or get to know the children and mission better, visit www.rafikifriends.org.

The Ludlams

My name is Darrington Ludlam and I am married to Stephen Ludlam (aka Lud). We live in Mississippi Delta where I am an elementary school teacher, and Lud is a college campus minister. We have two dogs named Oby and Copper and a few too many kittens. We have recently felt the call to adopt from Ghana and decided to begin documenting this journey in the blog world. Along the way, I hope to talk about books, movies, our families, our ministries, and much more! I am a lover of reading, watching HGTV, and reading adoption blogs. As a couple, we love to travel, eat, and hang out with our friends. I look forward to all the memories we document on this blog!

Our Call to Adoption Part 2

So, I had wonderful intentions of immediately sitting down to write this, but the past week has been crazy!

Well, in my previous post (Our Call to Adoption Part 1) I ended with Lud and I praying about adopting. Now, 6 months later we are finally ready to start sharing what we've decided to do.

We really feel that God has called us to adopt internationally. A few months ago, I began researching international adoption agencies. We found an agency we really loved (they do mission trips, orphan care, and birth mother education/care in addition to adoption). We filled out a pre-application and according to age and marriage parameters, we qualified for Ethiopia and Bulgaria. For some reason we did not feel a strong pull towards either. Then, a few weeks later the agency announced a pilot program in Ghana. I cannot explain the feeling in my heart.....it was like it jumped out of my chest. ***Rewind to last summer, when I went on a trip with the Wesley Foundation to Rafiki Village, an orphanage, in Ghana. I fell in love with the children there! It is a wonderful, warm, and welcoming country.*** So, I immediately contacted the agency to find out what a pilot program is. A pilot program is like a trial run of a few adoptions for the agency to get a feel for the way the adoption process will work in that country and to give families in the program in the future a time frame of how long the adoption process takes in that country. Only families who have completed an adoption with this agency before could apply and they were only accepting 3 families into the infant pilot program. Obviously we did not fall into that category!

Now, to some this may have seemed like a deterrent or an answer from God telling us that this was a closed door. However, to us, it felt like this pilot program would allow us to watch the adoption process unfold for the pilot families and it would give us time to save up some money. Also, I am working on my Masters in Elementary Education degree while working full-time and hope to be done with that in mid-2013. We hope that the pilot adoptions will be completed with those sweet babies at home by the end of this year. If everything works out the way we are praying, then we would officially begin applying for the program in early 2013. *Talk about God's perfect timing!*

So, where does that leave us in the adoption process? We are waiting before we even begin waiting for a precious baby from Ghana! We hope you will join us in praying for the families in the pilot program. We are praying that God provides funds for them and a clear path to their children. Also, please pray for us as we prepare our hearts for this journey.