Serving With Smiles goes to Ethiopia!

Hello! My name is Amanda, and I am a guest blogger today on the SWS Blog. We had another great Serving With Smiles project this last Saturday. Lots of great kids showed up and lots of great things were accomplished. Thanks everyone! Hope to see you next time around!
I wanted to come on here and tell you a little bit about my experience taking the Serving With Smiles bracelets and Geckos to Ethiopia just a few weeks ago. My husband I traveled to Addis Ababa (that's the capital city of Ethiopia,) to appear in court for the finalization of our adoption of two beautiful children there.
We took with us on our trip lots of bracelets and geckos that our sweet Serving with Smiles children made here in Saratoga Springs Utah. We were able to deliver them to 3 different orphanages where the children absolutely loved them! They were thrilled!
I can't post pictures of the full faces of orphans that are not my own children here, so I've only included these two photos so you can get a little bit of an idea.
That's our son in this photo below! See how happy this gecko made him?! He's a serious boy, so it was so nice to see this nice big smile out of him! :)
We thought the children there would like these bracelets and geckos, but we didn't know that they were gonna go nuts over them! It made them so happy!!! What surprised us even more, is that the boys liked the bracelets too. The girls liked the geckos too. The adults all wanted bracelets! They wanted all the babies to have bracelets. These were a hit!

I will tell you a little story I like to call
"The miracle of the Serving With Smiles Bracelets."
Here's how it goes in a nutshell...
We take over two large ziplock bags with SWS bracelets and geckos in them. We think we need to be careful and ration these out carefully there in Ethiopia. We visit 3 orphanages and find that everyone, and we mean everyone in those orphanages want a bracelet! We don't have the heart to turn anyone down at all. So we give them all out. Guess what? Still there are bracelets left!
We decide we have enough left over to give some out to children on the streets. We do that for a few days. Guess what? STILL bracelets left over!
Finally, the last day we are left with a bag that is still about half way full of bracelets! How did this happen?!
We are getting ready to head to the airport. We give out bracelets to all the children we see around us on the street. No kids left. Still about 12 bracelets!
Suddenly a man honks his horn to get our attention. He hops out of his truck. He had watched us giving these out and was hoping he could get one too. We give him the rest of the bag and encounter no more children. We like to imagine him taking those home to his family who probably loved them. What a funny story hu?

Thanks for all your work you little humanitarians! You made lots and lots and lots of Ethiopians happy!

When we go back to Ethiopia in about a month, we'll be bringing your hygeine kits you made. Thanks so much! You're gonna make a lot more smiles with all that serving you have done. We really appreciate you!