Orphaned no more

My World Magazine arrived the other day with a cover story on Ethiopian adoptions.   If you have an interest in better understanding the reasons behind the reduction in inter-country adoptions that the Ethiopian government announced in March, this article might be of interest.  

For us, it was reassuring to have an objective observer validate what we have been hearing from our agency staff.  Although there are some unfortunate and unacceptable incidents of failure and deception, safeguards do exist to protect against systemic fraud in the Ethiopian adoption process.

Click on the picture to link to the article on the World Magazine website.

Ryan

While we wait

So here we sit (to be honest, we have three busy children and a rather “high-needs” dog, so there is very little sitting going on around here, unless you count sitting on one’s bed following a behavioral infraction involving one’s brother’s favorite blanket, a foam sword, and a toilet).  In any case, we’re finished with our paperwork and we’re about 40^th in the Children’s Hope queue to adopt a child from Ethiopia.  There is literally nothing more we can do to expedite or advance our adoption process.  We expect to be matched with our baby shortly after the first of the year, roughly 8 months from now.  To help the kids (and us) process the wait time, we made a paper chain today.  Using 40 strips of red, green, and yellow paper (the colors of the Ethiopian flag); we created a chain that is now hanging in the doorway of our dining room, which represents the families in front of us in “line” to adopt kids from Ethiopia.

Each Friday, when we get our weekly update from the adoption agency, we find out how many happy families have received referrals that week (ie- how many people got matched with their children).  We will remove a link from our paper chain to correspond with each child who finds a home.  Yes, this will help us keep track of our relative position in line, but it’s going to do so much more than that.  The links on this chain will allow us to mark and celebrate children who are, one by one, being sought and found by their forever families.  It will help to widen our scope a bit.  With 145 million orphans worldwide, of course we know that the need is way bigger than us; it takes lots of willing families, lots of adoption agencies operating stateside and internationally in lots of different countries.  But it brings my heart a bit of joy and hope to know that as we celebrate with the families who are adopting orphans from Ethiopia through Children’s Hope International, ours is but one of eight international adoption programs that Children’s Hope operates.  And, that there are many other good and ethical adoption agencies operating in Ethiopia and in many other countries around the world (including the United States). 

So really, the links of our little paper chain could and should be multiplied to represent the families who are answering the call to adopt, just beginning the beautiful journey, or even contemplating whether adoption may be in store for their future.

Sarah

We are a "Waiting Family"

We heard from our adoption agency last week while we were out of town.  They said that our dossier had been sent back to their office from Washington D.C. after acquiring the necessary stamps and signatures there, and that we are now officially on the waiting list for a referral.  Yea!!!  Right now, families are waiting around 8 months for a referral from Ethiopia (ie- to be matched with a child), so we would expect, perhaps, to have some basic info about our child shortly after the first of the year.

After all the hustle and mass of paperwork over the past seven months, the next seven months will be really quiet.  We’ll likely use this time reading up on Ethiopia, learning a bit of the Amharic language, and preparing our house (and our family) for the addition of another child.

We’ll keep posting on this blog with some frequency over the coming months.  Stay tuned….

Sarah