Ethiopian Cooking

Today we decided to try our hand at Ethiopian cooking. We wanted to start with something that looked relatively easy, so we chose Doro Wat (spicy chicken stew), Abesha Gomen (collard greens with green peppers), and Injera.

This was our shopping list 

These were our ingredients

Some of the spices we had to make ourselves...this was berbere

Cutting up ingredients

First try at making injera

The finished product (not quite authentic, but still pretty good)

Time to eat

We have room for two more!

We surprised ourselves with how delicious everything turned out. However, we did find out that Wat really does mean extremely spicy stew.    

Number 8

We are slowly making our way to number one! We are excited to report that a couple of people received referrals last Friday. Yay for kids who now have forever families! AAI still expects another handful of referrals sometime soonish. We are not sure if we are high enough on the list to expect to be in that handful, but are thankful for some progress, and mostly for kids getting families and homes.

Please continue to join us in prayer regarding our kids, wisdom for officials in the Ethiopian government, and our agency staff. The wait is getting harder, (especially for one of us), so prayers for patience would also be appreciated. We are grateful for your support!

Keeping Busy

Since it looks like we might still be waiting for awhile before we receive our referral, we thought this might help to keep us busy while we wait.

After more than a month of searching the internet and compiling recipes and pictures, we have the final product, with more than 150 recipes for us to attempt. Some of them, like milas tibs (tongue stew) and hodiqa wat (kidney and liver stew) we probably won't even try. But others, like shimbra asa (fish-shaped chickpea dumplings) and sambusa (stuffed fried pastries) sound a lot more appetizing. Not to mention all the recipes for injera (the spongy bread eaten with almost everything). Hopefully our practice will pay off in the form of some delicious meals. We'll let you know how it goes.

PS. If you want try some of the recipes for yourself, just click on the picture above to download a copy of our cookbook.

A Little More News...

Hello all!

Time for another mini-update. AAI will hopefully be working with another orphanage east of Addis soon. Apparently they are a couple weeks away from being up and running! More news on that to come soon…

While we continue to sit at #10 on the referral list, AAI anticipates that some families will receive their referrals soon, meaning we will move up! The referrals they are waiting on are either in the process of being approved by the Ethiopian Government or getting medical evals completed. We are learning that approval from the government for a child’s referral has become a much lengthier process than it previously was.

Other random news:

* We decided to put the baby/kid room on hold and get some other areas of our house finished up first. Hence, no new pictures of the baby room and darling baby beds.

* Jon's last day of Papa John's is on Friday. It seems that our adoptions will not be on the short side of our anticipated timeline, giving us time to save with our "normal" jobs. We did, however, get over half of our thermometer colored in, so we definitely saw some financial progress.

* We are so thankful that God is in charge of faithfully orchestrating this major life change. I’m glad we are not in charge of this whole process. It’s beyond us.

* Please continue to pray for our kiddos, our agency staff, the Ethiopian Government, and families like us who are waiting.

* Praise God we get this opportunity!

Time for an Update

I know it has been a while since we posted, but not much has been happening. We are currently in the waiting phase, which understandably involves a lot of, you guessed it, waiting. We are starting to think that our "prediction" may be a little off. Referrals for our agency have really slowed down (or perhaps been nonexistent) for the past couple of months. AAI has been really good about keeping their clients in the loop about what is going on though. Here are a few things we have been told.

AAI recently discontinued working with one orphanage due to trouble obtaining clearance from the Ethiopian government office for additional referrals. This means that AAI is currently working with only 4 orphanages. One of these is rather small and hasn't produced many referrals, but it is currently in the process of working with another larger location and should be able to have a good number of referrals through them. If all goes as planned, hopefully this will happen within the next month.

AAI also recently participated in a teleconference to discuss the current status of adoptions in Ethiopia and to come up with solutions as to how to move forward to ethically and transparently better protect children, birth families, and adoptive parents. Some orphanages are currently being investigated by the Ethiopian government due to unethical practices or poor care, but of the ~200 orphanages in Ethiopia, only 77 are licensed for international adoption, and very few of those are under investigation. This has nonetheless contributed to the recent slow down of referrals, not only through our agency, but also through agencies across the nation. AAI relayed that everyone involved appears to be committed to finding solutions to these problems and that completing adoption cases with integrity and transparency will continue to be top priority for the agency.

All this to say that our adoption may take longer than what we had hoped. When we initially applied with AAI we were told that the time frame from dossier submission to adoption finalization would be 6-16 months, and we have no reason to believe that has changed. Of course everyone always hopes that it will be closer to the short end than the long end, but we continue to trust God and His timing.

Merry Christmas!

Hopefully at this time next year there will be two more smiling faces in front of our Christmas tree!

Predictions

We often get asked "So, when do you think you will hear something?" Usually we don't really know what to say, but now we may have an answer. We have spent the last few weeks perusing other Ethiopia adoption blogs. The blogs vary from families who have just started the process to families who completed their adoption more than 3 years ago. We have (or more specifically one of us has) gone through each of the more than 50 blogs we found and recorded the milestone dates. Finally, an average of the time between each milestone was calculated. Based on all of that, the predicted, projected date of our referral is...(drumroll please)...March 23, 2011.

For those who might be interested (although who knows why you would be) here are the milestone averages we came up with: agency application to dossier submission - 149 days; dossier submission to referral - 168 days; referral to court date - 79 days; and court date to home with child - 39 days. The average for the entire adoption process is 428 days. It is highly doubtful that these numbers are in any way statistically accurate or relevant, but finding them gave us something to do while waiting for our referral and now gives us a day to plan toward.

Feel free to comment with your own prediction or best guess as to when the referral date will be. The person closest may win a prize, or at the very least the opportunity to babysit for us one of these days.

Updates

• We are now number 10 on the waiting list. This is a little disappointing, as we have only moved up one spot in a month. This is also expected because the courts in Ethiopia close from August to October, so now that the courts are back open, our agency expects referrals to pick up.

• Current best guess for our first trip: July to October 2011.

• After 3 weeks as a server, Joy quit. No one was surprised. :-)

• Thanks for continuing to pray with us!  Happy Thanksgiving!

I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in His Word I put my hope.  Psalm 130:5

Beds!

We bought some cutie toddler beds off of craigslist today. This will probably guarantee that we get two infants! 

Let the Madness Begin!

It’s official. We might be crazy. We both got second jobs in anticipation of adoption expenses. There’s also the slight problem of needing a new car, which our neighbor boys kindly reminded us of when they knocked on the door last month to tell us that our car was on fire. They apparently didn’t know the difference between "a little smoke” and “on fire”. All the same, good to know people are looking out for us in case our car ever is on fire.

Anyway, Jon is delivering pizza for Papa John's and Joy is a server at Genghis Grill. We drew a thermometer to color in as we earn tips. Working towards a goal is more our thing, unlike some of our other blogger friends who seem to enjoy deadlines. :-) We may have been a little ambitious when we made the thermometer, though.  We got it out to color it for the first time tonight and realized we hadn’t even made it up to the first notch. Alas, still freezing.

I will blame this crazy schedule on Dave Ramsey and his debt free propaganda.