Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Guyana!!!

So, after much prayer and lots of discussion and research, we've narrowed our list of countries down to ONE :)




Guyana (pronounced gy-AN-ə), previously known as British Guiana, is on the northern coast of South America. Guyana has been a former colony of the British, Dutch, French and for 200 years the Spanish. Guyana is one of the few Caribbean countries which are not islands and

the population of Guyana is approximately 770,000. About 90% of people living there live on the coast(approximately 10% of the total land area of Guyana). The rest of the country is thick jungle, with little or no roads going into the interior.
The population of Guyana is made up of groups with ethnic backgrounds from India, Africa, Europe, China, with Aboriginal. These groups of diverse nationality backgrounds have a common language, English and Creole.
Some of the biggest problems the Guyanese people are facing are poor health care (with many people dying from AIDS, malaria, and because of bad drinking water...intestinal problems), also poverty is a huge issue.

The reason why we chose Guyana is pretty simple. We had narrowed down our choices to a few countries. Due to the fact that we already have 4 children, a lot of the countries wouldn't look twice at us. We were seriously considering Ethiopia as an option, but in the last few weeks the program for Ethiopia closed. We were also approved to go to South Africa, but the wait list is quite high and they prefer young childless couples. So, the choice left was Guyana and we are very excited about it!! We are happy that God laid out a clear choice for us because we were very uncertain which direction to take!
So, now we wait again. We haven't officially signed any papers, but we have to wait until the homestudy is done to make the next real move. Until then, we will be filing for citizenship or immigration, doing more research, making connections.

2 comments:

Anneke Naves said...

Wow Val, that's so exciting! I just stumbled on your blog now and look forward to reading more about this journey your family is about to take :)

scott+jenk said...

exciting that you've decided on a country! :O) hope all is going well!!

~jen