Club L Thursday 20th February 2025

Club L had 36 ladies attend our February meeting at High Tide Kitchen.

Thanks to Chully, all the staff for the delicious dinner served.

The guest speaker this month was Carolyn Bird talking about her & Ray’s adoption of their son Eric from Burundi.

Burundi is a landlocked African nation, one of the world’s poorest countries with high rates of sickness, human rights abuse & a high crime rate.

Civil war and ethnic cleansing between the Hutu & Tutsi peoples had orphanages full of children.

Carolyn & Ray decided to adopt a child from Africa after visiting orphanages in Africa on their travels, little did they understand or foresee the years of struggle with the Australian Government to allow them to become adoptive parents of an African child.

Policies to overcome included getting the QLD government to change their adoptive parent age status on adoptions from Africa, then onto the Federal Government to get them to be on board. 6.5 years later after clearing so many hurdles they found out a 2.5-year-old boy was available for adoption. It then took another 18 months for the adoption process to be complete.

Eric could only speak Kirundi which is the native language, with a smattering of French so there was an initial language barrier along with malaria & a bad ear infection in his first few weeks with his new parents.

Once Eric was back in Australia, he thrived but will always have memories of his early hard life.

Eric during a family visit to Italy got to reunite with Jonas his best friend from the orphanage in Burundi who had also been adopted internationally.