Troubling News from Ethiopia

We received some "not-so-great" news last week about adoption developments in Ethiopia. As the process currently goes, you give power of attorney to a representative from your agency and that person attends the court hearing in Ethiopia where the child becomes legally yours. Then you wait another 3-4 months and travel to pick up the child in coordination with the US Embassy Visa appointment.

Apparently there have been a number of situations where the parents of the child are traveling over to pick up the child and are finding things out about the child (age, health, etc.) that were not disclosed to them at the time the child was referred to the family. So there have been some families that show up and decide not to take the child home. This causes some MAJOR issues because the child is legally theirs at this point.

So it looks like now Ethiopia is going to require that the adoptive parents be present at the court hearing. This means a couple of things: 1. We will have to go over twice which will significantly increase our expenses and 2. We will meet and spend time with our legally adopted child and then have to leave them behind until we can return for the US Embassy Visa appointment a few months down the road.

So needless to say this is somewhat bad news. It does not change our resolve to push forward. Thankfully we have been blessed with the resources to be able to handle the additional expense that comes along with this change. The really bad thing about this will be meeting our child and then leaving our child for a period of time.

The silver lining here is that Ethiopia is doing something to prevent this from happening to any more children. It may also result in some people taking themselves off the list because they can't afford the additional expense which will help the process move faster for us. Either way it is unfortunate that it has come to something like this because of some irresponsible people somehwere in the process.