Scary Stuff...

There are some very serious changes being proposed right now in Ethiopia, and these would affect us greatly. The summary is that there is a government agency there that must write a recommendation letter regarding every adoption before a judge can hear the case and adoptive parents can be granted custody of their new child. This agency works very hard, and typically writes about 40 of these letters everyday. Well, they are proposing that beginning on March 10th, they will only write 5 letters per day. Since adoptive families were waiting two months or so for a court date when the agency was writing 40 letters, you can do the math and figure out that it would make the wait for a court date take a year, easily.

The US government, as well as the Ethiopian court system, are not in agreement with this plan. The motives behind it are wonderful: there is rising concern that child trafficking and other illegal practices are occurring, and they want to allow enough time to do more thorough investigations of all cases. However, this also would mean that thousands upon thousands of children who are in orphanages right now would remain there for much longer periods of time. When the orphanages are full, there would be no room for more children. I don't want to think about what would happen to them. Our government is in talks with them to try to get them additional training and staff, and if the problem truly is a lack of time/staff to investigate, I would hope that would help. We have also been told that things like this are stated sometimes but never come to fruition, so that may happen as well. They said they would begin this new policy on March 10th, so we should begin to see some answers throughout the week. Many adoption agencies, as well as the US State Department, are in talks with them this week as well, trying to find a compromise. Personally, my very selfish hope is that at the very least they won't delay things greatly for those of us who have been matched with a child already, so that those kids aren't languishing in orphanages for months more than necessary.

So right now, we wait. Our daughter waits. We pray. If you are the praying kind, we would ask that you pray as well. Pray for the government agency to try to find a solution that won't affect the long-term future of these children. Pray that court cases are allowed to continue at a reasonable rate. And please, pray for the children there, including our daughter, that they feel our love here and know that we are waiting for them, no matter how long it takes.