Ethiopia Update

We received a little update from our Ethiopia coordinator from the adoption agency that I thought I'd share. I referred to "longer wait times" in my first posting, and hopefully it looks like that might be changing slightly, according to Megan, the coordinator. A little background ... "referral" is a term that is used when a specific child is matched with an adopting family and the family is notified. "Addis" is the capital of Ethiopia.
(From Megan)
"Today, I thought it would be helpful to recap the court process in Ethiopia.

As you know, after you accept a referral, your case will be submitted to the Ethiopian courts, and a court hearing will be scheduled. Currently, we have been seeing court dates scheduled anywhere from two and a half to three months out. While these delays are frustrating, they are understandable since the vast majority of adoption cases (if not all) are heard at the First Instance Court in Addis. Therefore, thousands of adoption cases, as well as criminal and judicial hearings, are competing to get on the court’s schedule.

I was very pleased to hear from Ato Teklu (WACAP Director in Ethiopia) that he had been successful (along with several other agencies) in petitioning the court to schedule hearings within 1-2 months. We are hoping that court dates scheduled in the future will not be so far out. (For those of you who have court dates already, I do not expect dates to be rescheduled or moved up).

You might remember that the courts close from August 1 to the end of September for the “Summer Recess.” Even though the courts are closed during these months, we do expect to receive referrals as children become available and are in need."

Busy Days, Blessed Lives

I had a friend ask, "How are you guys?" recently, and this was my reposnse to her. This is less about the adoption, and more about the responsibilities of life at the moment: finishing a short plat, a house remodel in Seattle, homeschooling, adopting, starting a women's Bible Study at PLU, etc. Busy days, blessed lives.
We are ... stretching our muscles, I guess you could say. Running on the highest octane available! And though we can't think of a more "stressful" season of life between responsibilities, financial uncertainty, big decisions, timelines and deadlines, I have had precious moments of thankfulness and gratefulness that have to be only initiated by the Lord, because "life" would say otherwise at the moment: real conversations with Him about faith and trust. This season of uncertainly has brought emotions I haven't yet had, and doubts I had yet to trust the Lord with. I feel His nearness ... but not any false security that it will all work out the way I'm hoping it will. It has been sweet to me to get to feel Him sustaining me inside; for example, I had to pick up large rocks for 3 1/2 hours in the pouring down rain this week, and wheelbarrow them all the way up our driveway. I was alone, wet, sweating, covered in mud, blisters on my hands from hauling the heavy wheelbarrow, and my leg muscles were quivering from the strain of bending over and picking up the rocks for so long. But not once did my heart grumble, and I was acutally able to delight in seeing Christ sustain my heart in a not so "fun" situation. Something I could never have mustered up on my own.
So all that to say ... I'm not sleeping so well because I am so consumed with the things that need to get done, I've had a headache for about 10 days, and I'm still not sure if there is light at the end of the tunnel. Yet, in the midst, I'm okay with confessing my anxiety, praying for a miracle, hoping in something greater, and being sustained each day.

We made the trip over to Yakima on Tuesday to get our fingerprints ... and all went well ... except for the fact that they said my prints have "worn-off." I suppose that could benefit me in my future as a criminal. But for the time being, it means that the FBI may reject my prints and require I do it again. What will a second round of prints do? It's not as if they grow back over the next few weeks. Apparently, the FBI can then match round one "bad prints" with round two "bad prints" and give the clearance at that point. Besides, not wanting to make another trip back to Yakima, it would set us back several months in the adoption process. Needless to say, we are praying my "prints" mysteriously clear up in route to the FBI! At the same time, it still remains a delight to trust in the Lord's perfect tapestry of our journey ... even if it means another trip to Yakima.

In the Beginning ...

"When does God begin His special plan in a life? Is it when He gives a promise or when He finally brings the promise to pass? Although it may not always be obvious to us, there seems to be one distict moment when God begins a new story in each of our lives. He writes words on our hearts that long to be spoken and strain to be lived out. Then with His own great hand, He begins to write the script. Experience by experience through seemingly ordinary days, He supernaturally orders our lives. Only when we look back and reflect on what appeared to have been the ordinary events of life does it become clear what a miracle the Lord has performed." - The Strength of Mercy, Jan Beazely.

Where to begin ... hard to start a new page when there has been so many pages previously unwritten ... so just to dive into this stage of our journey in life, feels vague and disconnected, but nevertheless, this is where we will begin ...

On January 4th we heard a sermon on adoption. A message of how we, as children of God, were orphaned children, lost without a home, until Christ came and adopted us into the Kingdom of God. And what a price He paid that we would have a place to call home forever. We have always had a little seed in our hearts to adopt a child someday, but with 3 small ones at home currently, adoption had been tucked away until "another day." At least, so we thought. After that service, our hearts could not be silenced or still. Not another day was going to pass without us taking the next step toward bringing an orphan to our home. On January 20th, after 100 hours of research on adoption agencies, we turned in our application to adopt through WACAP. We met with our social worker the following week and two weeks from the day, she had our notarized homestudy in our hand! Meanwhile, I was on turbo-mode to complete all the paperwork needed for the dossier (documents needed for adopting) and sent them off to the state for verification. We drive to Yakima next week to get fingerprinted and then just have to wait for our I-171H to be the final piece before they can send of our dossier to Ethiopia. Yes, Ethiopia. Without having a "reason" why we chose Ethiopia, other than our hearts kept being pulled back there whenever we looked into other places, we looked at the sheer number of orphans in Ethiopia and the massive growing number of orphans.

So for the most part now, we wait. We don't get put on the actually "Waiting List" until our I-171H comes back, and that will be an exciting day to finally hear where we fall in the scope of timeframes. I wonder if the waiting will be hard? The only bummer news is that the wait times to travel after receiving a referral have be increasingly longer and will only continue to get longer because the court dates are getting pushed further out because of the increased number of families applying to adopt from Ethiopia (what a great problem to have)! Ethiopia courts are closed August and September for the rainy season (we'd be closed year-round if we had a rule like that!) so they just fall further and further behind each year. So instead of it being 5-12 weeks to travel after referral, it now is growing to almost double that. But I told the Lord in the beginning I trusted His perfect timing and I still do. So it is a delight to wait on Him.

That is a piece of our update. So much more to come. The paperwork is done ... at least for now. Thanks for sharing in this with us.