Court approved!

Today, after a 3-day vigil, we received word that we are court approved! The power had indeed gone out in Addis, but after our hearing (thank you God) and was out for two days. The wait felt like a very, very long labor (albeit without those pesky labor pains).

But after the labor comes the joy! So, without further adieu, let me introduce you all to our daughter, Mekelit Keziah Elefe Dannug.

Mekelit - Amharic, "gift to God" (this is M.'s birth name)
Keziah - Hebrew, "sweet-scented" (I had spelled it without the "h," but Norm wanted to go with the biblical spelling, since her namesake's is spelled that way)
Elefe - Amharic, "she who is great and surpasses everything" (an Ethiopian name we chose for Mekelit)

This is Mekelit's referral picture, taken shortly after her arrival at the orphanage last October and the only picture we have of her. Her hair was shaved for ease of care and she is currently so small that she doesn't even show up on the Pediatric developmental chart, but that will change once we get her home. Until then, we are just very grateful that she is being clothed and fed and cared for by her caregivers at the orphanage.

Our visa appt. in Addis Ababa is scheduled for April 16th, which means we leave for Ethiopia on April 11th and will return on April 21st. This is a week later than the date we were originally given, which had us going over Easter, something that was very meaningful to me. I was bummed to miss Easter in Addis, until I remembered that Ethiopia is Christian Orthodox, which means they celebrate their Easter on a different date. That date is April 19th, so we wiil not miss Easter in Ethiopia after all!

Now we have two and a half weeks to do a mountain of paperwork and preparation. I'll try to write with any updates when I can.

Thank you so much to all who prayed for our court date and sent so much encouragement and additional prayer during our "vigil." And for everyone's love and care for us during this adoption journey-- it has been a sustenance we have drawn upon all along the way. You continue to bless... xo

Court Date

We received our court date! It's scheduled for March 23rd. Our social worker said that would put our visa appt. around April 9th, at this point, which means we would leave for Ethiopia around April 5th. We will not get a confirmed visa appointment, however, until our court date goes through, so the date could change. Travel arrangements, etc. cannot be made until after the court date, so we'll have a very busy couple of weeks after March 23rd! Until then, we've started making the preparations we can. The busy-ness, I'm finding, is a helpful distraction from the waiting.

After we got our referral, we were able to send a couple of small gifts to Kezia. We sent a photo album with pictures of Norman, Peter, Sam, India (our dog) and I and a small teddy bear. We were told that the nanny's at the orphanage would show Kezia the pictures of us on a regular basis. I wonder if it will make a difference; if we will be a little less strange to her. I hope so.

When we received our referral, we were sent a picture of Kezia, any known history and of course, her birth name (which we are not allowed to reveal online until our court date). Since our daughter will be two and a half when we get her, Norman and I have decided to keep her birth name and use Kezia as her middle name. We believe keeping her given name is what's best and we are delighted that she was given a beautiful, meaningful Ethiopian name by her birth mother. That is the name we feel she should keep as her rightful first name. However, until we are able to disclose the name and for the sake of this blog, I'll keep referring to her as Kezia.


DID YOU KNOW...

The official language in Ethiopia is Amharic.

The Most Wonderful Christmas Gift

Yesterday, we received the call we have been waiting 8 months for: we got our referral!! Our agency called us Wednesday afternoon and told us that they had matched us with a two-year-old girl! She's healthy and beautiful, though only a mere 19 lbs.

We are delighted beyond words. We had hoped (and prayed) the referral would come before Christmas, but our adoption agency closes for the holidays after this Friday, so by Wednesday morning we had resigned ourselves to getting the referral in 2009. Then we got the call! What a happy, happy day.

(Ethiopian child protection laws do not allow us to post her photo/identifying information online until she is legally ours. But as soon as she is, we'll post pictures.)

Children's Hope FedEx'd us the hard copy of Kezia's info. and papers we need to sign and return in the next 4 days. The next step is getting a court date. The court appt. is what makes Kezia legally ours. We will travel to Ethiopia about 3-4 weeks after this occurs. That should happen sometime in the next 3 months. Until then, there is much to do to prepare.

Please pray for Kezia... protection and love, love, love to cover her. Also, grace for the court date to happen without any glitches. Sometimes they get rescheduled at the last minute. We'll keep you posted.

Have a most blessed Christmas!

"What's adopting?"

(NOTE: For the update on our adoption proceedings, scroll down to the 7/31 post, "Catching Up.")

Following is a conversation my six-year-old son, Sam, had with his friend Aiden on a recent play-date.

I had been asking Aiden about his brothers and sisters and then Sammy said:

Sam: We are adopting a baby from... from...
Me: Ethiopia.
Sam: Yeah, Ethiopia.
Me: That's in Africa.
Aiden: What's 'adopting'?
Sam: It's when you get a baby, but the mom stays regular and then you fill out all of these papers and then you get a baby.
Aidan: (After a thoughtful pause) Make sure you take a pen with you that doesn't run out of ink.
Sam: Yeah.
Me: (Trying hard to compose myself) Thank you, Aiden. That's very good advice.

Treasure

I was thinking today, as I often do, of something my friend Dana said in an email once. Norman and I had asked her to write a reference letter for us for our home study, and she was relaying to me the many hoops she had had to jump through just to get her letter notarized (oh, how I empathized). After thanking her profusely for her willingness to go through such trouble on our behalf, she said no problem, she understood about institutions and red tape and, in fact, believed there was probably a reason for such hassles. She went on to say that, "if any of these little inconveniences is enough to deter someone, then they shouldn't be trying to get no African treasure..."

African treasure... yes... that's what Kezia is to us (though an Ethiopian would kindly correct and say "Ethiopian treasure") and she is what I hold out in front of me every time I face another one of those "little inconveniences" (and some not-so-little ones). Kezia is what I think about when I get angry or irritated about the incessant red tape... the snail-like pace of things... the daily revisions to our ever-tender hope and expectations. Kezia is, after all, the Treasure we are working towards. She is the reason I can learn to live with and surrender such things. She is the reason I get up every morning and face another day hoping; the reason I can learn again to open my heart to another child; to stand with it wide-open and waiting for her to come and fill it in the way that only she can. The vulnerability of this terrifies me at times, but I don't care. She is worth it.

There is a freedom in that place, and a revelation: Only love can do that. I have not the courage for any of it apart from that-- of that I am most clear. But love can do it. Poured through and out of me, not of my own doing but His. Grace given if I let it. And every day that I can, I do.

(Thank you, Dana)

"Adoption is not a humanitarian act. It is a gift."

- Angelina Jolie

Catching up

It's August tomorrow and I haven't written in some ungodly amount of time, I know. I began our adoption journey with such hope; such earnestness... but it soon gave way to much deeper things emotionally; things I didn't feel inclined, at the time, to share with all of cyberspace. Norm and I hadn't fully realized what beginning the process of adding another child to our family would bring up after having lost a child. So I stopped and gave myself some space. Now, things are not quite so raw, so I thought I'd give this another try. There's perhaps more to tell now anyway and we do so want to keep our friends and family in our adoption "loop."

I changed the name of my blog to this verse in Habakkuk. I love Ubuntu (that one word could encapsulate such truth and grace is a wonder to me), but this verse uniquely speaks to our story. It's the verse I hold onto every day... the verse that speaks to God's plan and a dream long held... that encourages in the waiting that I sometimes think might break my heart... and my anchor in these often turbulent waters of international adoption.

Our "paper pregnancy" lasted-- get this-- 9 months. Our fully gestated dossier was finally delivered in April, 2008. I had been working steadily on our paperwork since last August and had completed it (I thought) three times before it actually got sent to our agency. Each time I sent it in for approval there was something wrong with one document or another. It was quite a learning curve-- Norm and I got very good at being utterly anal about keeping our ducks in a row (Norm's actually quite meticulous in general about such things-- I tend to shoot more from the hip-- and even he was surprised by just HOW meticulous things needed to be). What a wild ride it was!

(We are so thankful for gracious and extremely patient friends, family and notaries who contributed to our paperwork and bore with our aforementioned meticulousness. You blessed... )

By the time our third round of paperwork was rejected, the process had taken so long that some of our documents were expired and had to be redone. Two months later, our fourth submission was approved and our dossier was officially completed on April 8th, 2008. It was then sent to Washington D.C. to be authenticated and then bundled and sent off to Ethiopia in May. I was overjoyed and so relieved! The only shadow on that fine day was learning that referral times had been extended to 6-10 months (it had been 2-4 months when we started) which, translated, means that we will probably not get Kez until sometime in 2009 (up until that point, Norm and I were still holding out hope that we might be able to get her by the end of summer). I cried.

We of course knew it could happen-- our agency had been warning us that as more and more people start adopting from Ethiopia, there would be longer wait times. But Norm and I had both thought that we would be finished with our adoption before things got rolling to that extent. But the Ethiopia program is growing very fast, and our paper pregnancy went very S-L-O-W. Still, we hold out hope for a shorter rather than longer wait, even as we realize that this could very well be a grace to us. We do still need to come up with the second half of our adoption expenses. The money showed up in one form or another for our first three payments... we are praying for the same for our next three. Would you please pray with us for this?

Also-- please pray for Kezia. She's very likely already born, there in Ethiopia, facing who knows what circumstances each day in her very young life. Cover her with your prayers. They carry... they carry...

We're getting there

I get an "Ethiopia Update" email from our adoption agency every couple of weeks or so. I received one yesterday. They currently have 21 dossiers in country right now, with 10 families having already gotten their referral. They said of the ten, the shortest waiting period for a referral was 12 days (!!), and the longest was 3 1/2 months. From there, currently, families are traveling to Ethiopia to get their children about 2 - 2 1/2 months after receiving their referral. This gives you some idea of the timeline we will be looking at, though the more families that keep applying for Ethiopian adoption, the slower things will get. When I met with my coordinator last week, she said that Ethiopia is the "new China," that it is the fastest-growing adoption program out there. I felt so happy about this, on the one hand-- it spoke hope to me for some of the 4.8 million orphans in Ethiopia. But honestly, another part of me worried about the possibility of the process slowing down. Waiting, in adoption, is the hardest part.

Last week we had our garage sale to help raise money for the adoption fund. It was hot and rain threatened, but we made $220. Not bad. The best part of the garage sale were the kids-- ours and the neighbor kids. Peter and Sam each sold some of their own things and gave a portion of what they earned to the fund. They also ran the lemonade/snack stand we had (their idea). They told all their neighbor friends about why we were having the sale and those kids became some of our best customers. They just really wanted to HELP, you know? One of the boys even dropped by later in the evening to give me three pennies. "For your adoption," he said, most proudly. I was very touched. The next day several kids asked me if we had earned enough to "get a baby." After all of their enthusiasm, I didn't have the heart to tell them, "Uh, not quite." I just said, "We're getting there! Thanks to all of you, we're getting there." They seemed happy with that...

This week we go get fingerprinted for the Immigration/Dept. of Homeland Security paperwork. Please pray for this. This paperwork takes the longest amount of time to process and is the thing that has the most potential to hold up a dossier. It's the immigration paperwork that will allow Kezia to be brought into the States. It's a good sign that we already have our appt. to be fingerprinted. Please pray that the rest goes as smoothly.

DID YOU KNOW...

that Ethiopia's religious roots are Judaic. The Queen of Sheba, after traveling to meet King Solomon, brought Judaism back with her to Ethiopia. Later, Ethiopia was converted to Christianity. Today most Ethiopians practice an orthodox form of Christianity similar to that of the Greek Orthodox Church.