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

The Anchor Leg of the Paperwork Chase

When we met our adoption consultant and handed over our paperwork last Monday, she went over everything again while we sat there (this was the umpteenth time our papers had been reviewed, so we weren’t too worried).  And, she doubled checked that she had received everything else she needed for our file.  She had.

Although it’s out of our hands now, our paperwork has a couple final destinations to visit.  The adoption agency sends dossiers to their courier in Washington, D. C. every Thursday.  The courier takes our dossier around to the US Department of State and the Ethiopian Embassy (so that’s where our paperwork has been these past two days).  Usually the courier sends the documents back to the adoption agency the next week (which would be this coming week, for us).  This is all well ahead of that drop-dead date of 07/23/11 when a letter from one of our medical doctors will “expire” due to an outdated notary stamp.  Wheww!!

And at that point, after these last two offices have signed off on our stuff, we are considered by our agency as a “waiting family” for a child from Ethiopia.  Right now, there are about 40 families in front of us (though not all of those families are waiting for the same children…some want older children, some want younger, some are seeking sibling sets, etc).  When we go on the list this week, we will be told our exact position in the queue and we will be able to mentally “track” our progress as we read of families receiving referrals in the weekly updates that we get from our agency.  Yeah!!

We’ll let you know what we hear.

Sarah

You’re not even going to believe this one…

We had a busy weekend.  Sarah’s parents traveled from IA and met us over in St. Louis for a long weekend, which included Grant’s Farm, the St. Louis Zoo, and Magic House Children’s Museum.  In a year when we are working to conserve money and Ryan’s vacation days from work (in hopeful anticipation of overseas travel next year), it was a wonderful little vacation for us. 

So, on Saturday morning, we were busily finishing our last minute packing, with the intention of dropping the dog off when the kennel opened at 8am and getting on the road.  Ryan providentially opened the front door “to let in a little of the cool morning air,” he said (which was so refreshing after a week of 95 degrees!!!). 

Upon doing so, he found a little slip of paper tucked in our door.  It was a form indicating that the postman had tried to deliver a piece of certified mail to us on Friday (at a time when I wasn’t home apparently), which was now being held for us at the post office.  I got a little nauseous because I was pretty sure it had something to do with our adoption dossier, which I had sent via certified mail to the KS Secretary of State three days previously.  Had I stupidly misaddressed it?  Had they not accepted it for some reason?  Had they seen some fatal error immediately upon opening it?  Have I mentioned how hard I worked on this mailing…it was certified, it was express, it included a self-addressed stamped envelope (also certified and express, and with extra postage thoughtfully added to account for the 19+ sheets the Secretary of State would add to the existing weight of the package).  I nearly collapsed in an exhausted heap in front of the postal counter when it was all finished.  And since then, I had been feeling such relief at having that thing mailed off exactly as requested.  But now, we decided to delay our departure time by 30 minutes so that we could stop at the post office when it opened at 8:30am and retrieve our mail. 

Then Ryan, ever the optimist, said, “I think it’s done.  I think the Secretary of State did his certifications and is returning our documents to us, ready to go.”  I tried to explain that this would be impossible because I had just mailed the stuff on Tuesday.  It would have arrived on Wednesday, would have had to have been put back in the mail in Topeka on Thursday at least, so that the mailman here could attempt (unsuccessfully) to deliver it to us on Friday.  “And remember, honey, there were 19 documents for him to certify.  It took the IA guy about a week to process three documents,” I said.

Dear reader (if you are out there), let me remind you for a moment, whenever we receive the certified documents back from the KS Secretary of State, the whole dossier gets reassembled (by adding the forms that were previously certified by the IA Secretary of State) and sent to our adoption agency, which happens to be located in…just guess where…St. Louis, MO.

So Ryan, still optimistic, decided that we should take along the IA documents for our dossier, just in case the certified documents were awaiting us at the post office (and remember that we’re stopping at the post office on our way out of town…on vacation…spending extended hours in our van over the next several days).  That way, we could potentially hand-deliver the completed dossier to our adoption agency during our trip to St. Louis.  I, slightly more pessimistic realistic, said that it sounded like a good way to lose, wrinkle, or otherwise damage two perfectly certified IA birth certificates and a marriage license.  That said, I rounded up the documents.

We dropped off the dog, filled up with gas, and stopped at the post office right when it opened.  When I went in and presented my form, the mailman went into the back and returned with an envelope.  I could see that it was the one I had self-addressed and wasn’t sure if that was good news or bad.  I didn’t rip it open until I got back in the van, and the first thing I saw was a certification sheet from the office of the KS Secretary of State!!  I couldn’t believe it.  I pulled out the packet and found all 19 certifications stapled to the original documents (no explanation, no cover letter, no receipt for our payment…no time for that stuff, I guess, if you’re turning packets around in 6 hours).

So, I spent the next 10 miles reassembling our completed dossier, listening to Ryan say, “I told you so,” and leaving a message for our adoption consultant, explaining that we were on our way to St. Louis with a complete dossier in hand.  And, then I spent the next 250 miles after that holding the precious stack on my lap, so as to save it from inevitable coffee splashes, flying shoes, and sharp turns.

I can’t even tell you how thankful I was to have Ryan find that postal note in our door before we left for the weekend.  Surely it would have blown or washed away in the weekend weather.  It may have been who knows how long until we realized that we had paperwork awaiting us at the post office.  Thank you God!!  And what a treat to be able to visit the adoption agency in person, meet face to face with the people whom we communicate regularly, and hand over our paperwork.

Sarah

We’re almost there…

As I said, we received our form from Immigration & Citizenship on Friday.  We had it notarized Monday, and the whole packet went out in yesterday’s mail to the Kansas Secretary of State (for his certification).  Now, I don’t want to stoke any inter-state rivalries, but if the office of the KS Secretary is even half as fast as the office of the IA Secretary, we’ll be pleased (though, we had just three documents to be certified in IA and there are 19 that need KS certification).  We really have no idea how long this certification might take…I would be delighted to have our documents back in 10 days.

It’s a bit of a horse race because one of the letters in our dossier was notarized by a person whose commission expires 07/23/11.  Our dossier needs to make it to the US Department of State before that date to be considered current.  If we miss that date, suffice it to say that we’ll have some re-work to do.

We’ll keep you posted!!

Sarah

She’s good…she’s with us

After a couple weeks of running to the mailbox in hopeful anticipation, I was delighted on Friday to find our Notice of Favorable Determination Concerning Application For Advance Process of Orphan Petition from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services!!  It is a page that we will take with us when we travel to Ethiopia to bring home our baby.  It’s a long title for a paper that will essentially allow various officials (US Embassy in Ethiopia, airport checkpoints, Homeland Security, US Immigration) to say, “On her own, she doesn’t qualify...she’s not a citizen, she doesn’t meet the necessary requirements to enter the country, but we’ve checked out the people with whom this little one is coming home.  We know and can vouch for the two people who are traveling with her (they’ve been through the proverbial “ringer”), and if they say she is theirs and she belongs here with them, then she’s cool.”  And then, just like that, it won’t matter that she doesn’t bear official government-issued identification, a US birth certificate, or a passport, just as long as she’s with us.

This process begs the comparison to what Jesus Christ does for us, as believers.  On our own, we have no place in heaven.  None of us qualify or meet the entrance requirements (of holy perfection).  Apart from Jesus, our citizenship most certainly lies right here on this fallen earth, and we stand no chance of success when facing the judgment seat of Almighty God.  However, for those of us who love and serve Jesus, the Son steps in on our behalf (and this is the beautiful, merciful, unbelievable part) and says to the Father, “She’s one of mine.  She belongs here with Us.  She’s cool.”  And then, just like that, our failures, our misdeeds, and our lack of merit matters not, just as long as we’re with the One.

Sarah