What We Know

I am not a true blogger as you can see from the frequency of my posts.  If it can't be said in the character limitations of a facebook status update then it probably won't get shared.  However, seeing that I am on week 2 of caring for sick children and being confined to the house I'm willing to give this blogging thing another try.  Besides, gauging from the number of times I get asked, I know someone out there wants to know the answer to the million dollar question "Have you heard anything yet?"

If you goggle Ethiopian adoptions and U.S. Embassy right now you'll find several articles and blogs that will probably explain the situation much better than I can but here's how it is affecting my family:

The normal (I use that word loosely as there is nothing normal in adoptions) process for an Ethiopian adoption is you 1) get a referral (after mountains of paperwork and months/years of waiting), 2) travel to Ethiopia to meet your child, go before an Ethiopian court, and travel back home without your child 3) upon passing the Ethiopian court you submit a request with the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa for a visa for your child, and 4) you travel to Ethiopia to bring your child home once you have been cleared by the Embassy.

We currently are waiting on the U.S. Embassy to give us visa approval to bring our child into the United States.

We received our referral on Oct. 12, 2011 and traveled to Ethiopian the week before Christmas to meet our little guy.  On Dec. 19, 2011 an Ethiopian judge declared that our son was legally ours.  Her words "once I sign these papers he's yours, there is no turning back" have been etched in my mind since that day.  

The absolute joy I felt that day, combined with the reality of knowing I would be leaving my 6th child halfway around the world the next day, brought a heaviness to my heart that has been there since.

Two weeks after passing court our file was submitted to the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa on January 3, 2011.  Little did we know at that time that things were in the process of changing with the Embassy procedures.  Under "normal" circumstances we would have expected the Embassy to take 2-3 weeks to look at our file and we'd be on a plane heading to get our son around mid to late January.  However, due to reasons that are better explained elsewhere (and quite honestly if I tried to explain them here you probably would scratch your head, think that is so crazy, and go look them up yourself) the Embassy has chosen to treat every adoption as a possible criminal activity. 

For the past 7 1/2 weeks we have waited while our Embassy requests phone numbers that were already in their possession (with police reports) and attempts to contact police officers that could confirm the details regarding our son's case.  In 2 months they can tell us that they have made 5 attempts to talk to the police.  We know they had a short conversation with one person at the police station who confirmed some details but was not the officer on the case.  (Just an fyi, phone lines are unreliable in Ethiopia and voice mail is pretty much non-existent.)  Now we are told to wait some more while they review the merits of our case.

So what happens next?  At some point we will probably be told by the U.S. Embassy that our file is "not clearly approval" and they will send it to the USCIS office in Nairobi, Kenya for further review.  Again, there's lots out there on this but basically whereas the U.S. Embassy has to prove 100% certainty our son's orphan status, the USCIS looks at the reasonableness of his orphan status (i.e. he is most likely a legitimate orphan).

When can the U.S. Embassy tell us they are referring our case to Nairobi?  Anyone's guess is as good as mine.  They've been known to send them within a week and also been know to sit on the file for months.  We do know that once they send it, it takes about a week to get there and then USCIS has 30 days to review it.  At that point the USCIS can approve it, send it back to Embassy in Addis and we travel to bring home our son (maybe within a couple of weeks of approval).  On the other hand, the USCIS can issue a Request for Evidence (RFE) at which point we hire an international adoption attorney and continue the fight for our son.

Let me just stop here and say my emotions have run the gamut - I've been distraught, heart broken, sad, angry, appalled, bitter, and just outright mad.  I've had times of feeling anxious and other times of feeling at peace.  Some days are just better than others.  Would I still go back and do everything the same if I had known we'd end up here?  You bet!  One look at our little guy's face and you know instantly he's ours.  God ordained him as our son.  And the same God who gave me 3 wonderful biological children and 2 beautiful daughters through the blessing of adoption will see that our son comes home.  How do I know this?  Just read our first 2 adoption stories...He's in every detail.

So we wait and we continue to pray.  And trust me...when we hear something you will know.