1 Year Anniversary?

Today marks 1 year since we applied to Holt International's Ethiopia Program.  It's amazing how fast a year goes by.  It took us almost six months to get all our paperwork together, so we have been on the "waiting list" for a little over six months.

This means that we are just waiting for a referral now.  A referral is when we get a child's profile and then we would accept the profile and know who our child will be.  When we first applied, Holt thought we would be on the waiting list for 9-12 months, now they are saying 15 months or longer.  Anything could happen, so we are just trusting God for his perfect timing and provision.

It's hard explaining to people why the process is slowing down.  The amount of orphans has not decreased in Ethiopia, but there seems to be an ever changing tangled ball of issues.  I'm not even going to attempt to explain it on this blog, partly because sometimes we aren't sure what information is true and what is false.  One thing we know to be true is that there is a child out there that needs parents and we want them to be part of our family, so we will continue waiting.

If we are on the waiting list for 15 months, that means that we would get a referral in December this year. After that, the legal process of adoption starts and we would hopefully get a Ethiopian court date within 6 months (which we would travel for).  If Ethiopia approves the adoption, then the U.S. Embassy has to clear it as well, which takes an additional 2 months at least (once we are cleared, we can travel immediately to pick up our child!).

If you are following all the months, this would put us around August 2013 in the states with our additional little pooper.  This time line is best case scenario - and as we've learned from others since beginning this process - anything can happen at any point in this time line.  As you can see, we still have quite a wait ahead of us.  When everything is completed, it will be all the sweeter!  Please continue to pray for us and our future little one!  Pray that the time of separation from us can be as little as possible, because in all reality our future child could be in an orphanage right now.  Crazy to think about.