Our First Ethiopian Meal!

We spent Memorial Day weekend with some friends in Dallas. While we were there, we decided that it would be a great opportunity to sample some authentic Ethiopian cuisine.

Pretty much everything was served with injera, a spongy, crepe-like bread that is a staple of most Ethiopian meals.

We tried several appetizers including kitfo, which is ground tenderloin beef tartar with exotic spices and butter rolled in injera.

We also tried several different entree combination plates. This is the vegetarian plate and includes missir wott (pureed lentils), shiro (pureed yellow peas), yataklet alitcha (cabbage, potatoes & carrots), and gomen (sauteed spinach and onions) all on a large piece of injera.

We finished the meal with a cup of Ethiopian coffee. What a great weekend and great meal with friends!

Summer School?

School's out for summer! So why are we still taking classes? I guess they are more trainings than classes. And there are no tests. We are just doing a few hours of online courses required by our adoption agency. The topics range from Child Attachment to Race and Culture to Discipline and are geared toward preparing us for some of the issues that may arise after the adoption is completed. So far they have been interesting and got us thinking about some things that we may not have otherwise. I guess that is the point. They actually go pretty fast. Only a few more evenings of training and then we can get back to the paperwork. But hooray for summer!

Home Study Time!

We are well on our way with the first of three big paperwork phases…the home study. The home study is done to educate and prepare, as well as evaluate, the adoptive family. A social worker from Dallas is scheduled to come on Saturday, June 5th to spend three hours getting to know us. After her visit, it should take about two weeks for her to complete the home study report. Then we can move on to the next step.

We are already getting paper work together for United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), but we’ll need a notarized copy of the home study to send in with that so we have to wait until it is finished before proceeding. Our goal is to have everything for the second phase mailed by the 4th of July. Supposedly USCIS approval can take one to six months, so we are already praying it will be closer to the one month side.

The final phase will be for us to complete the dossier (pronounced doss-see-ay), which contains the official papers that get sent to Ethiopia, translated, and then given to the Ministry of Women’s Affairs (MOWA) within the government. The dossier includes, among other things, both a notarized copy of the home study as well as the forms from the USCIS, which explains why it is the last step.

We are hoping to get everything on our end finished as quickly as possible. We’ll keep you posted!

Need Notary...Will Pay

We have definitely begun. We are buried in paperwork. A notarized letter from the police station? A notarized letter from our bosses? Okay, these are a little out there, but at least they are understandable. The one that is really getting us is that we need a notarized letter from our doctor. The instructions explicitly say, if your doctor's office doesn't have a notary, you need to bring your own to the appointment. BYON? Not sure we have built up that kind of relationship with Kay at Lubbock National Bank yet.

We've Finally Started!

Welcome to Our Ethiopia Adoption blog. As you may or may not know, adoption is something that we have been contemplating for quite a while. Ever since the question "What do you think about adoption?" was posed on our first date on October 1, 2003 (who brings that up on a first date, anyway?), we have been thinking about adoption. Since then, God has continued to strengthen our mutual desire to adopt. And now, 6 1/2 years later, we finally feel like the time is right to get started growing our family through adoption.

The first step was to decide where we wanted to adopt from. We have always had a desire for international adoption, so after much research and prayer we chose to adopt from Ethiopia. We picked Ethiopia for several reasons. First, it was a country where we met the minimum age and income requirements. Second, it was a country that met our criteria for being able to adopt an infant. We are also hoping to adopt more than one child, and this is a country that would allow us to. We are super excited to be adopting from Ethiopia!

The second step was to choose an agency. After much more research and prayer, we made the decision to go with Adoption Associates, Inc., based in Michigan. Through our online research and a phone question session, we determined that the folks there seemed to be very knowledgeable and experienced with Ethiopian adoption as well as having enough personnel to give our case the necessary attention. We mailed off our formal application on Tuesday, May 11, and the estimated timeline is anywhere from 12 to 18 months, so the countdown is on.

Thanks for visiting our blog! We are excited to have you share this journey with us!