Ethiopia Program Updates

February was an exciting month for adoptions from Ethiopia.  On February 27, we welcomed home our last traveling family out of the 10 total for the month.  Congratulations to you all and welcome home with your beautiful children. 

In March, five families have received court dates and are awaiting decisions for their adoptions. Our prayers are with you in this time of excitement and anticipation. 

February is Black History Month. PBS has some wonderful programming on this month related to African and African American History. Also, this might be a good time to become familiar with popular Ethiopians in history as well.

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Thirteen children will come home from Ethiopia this February, their parents having completed their international adoptions overseas. Eleven children are home so far this month! Currently the longest wait time from paperwork submission to Ethiopia to referral has been five months.

Melkam Addis Amet (Happy New Year)!
At the close of 2007, Children’s Hope was blessed to place 10 children into 8 families in the U.S., including one special needs child. We are expecting even greater things in 2008! One family has traveled home with her little girl this month and we are expecting many, many more to follow.

There are so many wonderful things happening in the Ethiopia program; 16 families have been matched with a referral since the courts closed and reopened, families have received court dates and more are preparing to travel. Two families returned home with heir children in late November. One of our singles leaves for Ethiopia this Saturday, December 8. We wish you the best in your travels!

The Ethiopia Team has matched fourteen Children’s Hope families with their children since the Ethiopian courts closed in September and have now reopened. Since the beginning of November, four families have received referrals and four additional families with earlier referrals have had court dates scheduled. It is an exciting time as the courts reopen to finalize our families’ adoptions prior to their travel to Ethiopia!

Ethiopia families have been celebrating this past month with referrals. Nine children have been referred to eight families since September 10, with one family receiving a referral for twin girls! The youngest referral received was for a 6-week-old infant girl. These children were referred from three orphanages Children’s Hope is currently working within in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

On September 11, Ethiopia celebrated its own new millennium. Welcome, Ethiopia, to the year 2000!

Adhering to the 13-month Julian calendar (which all countries followed for 1500 years), Ethiopia is now seven years and eight months behind the current international standard Gregorian calendar. The Ethiopian New Year is celebrated on 1 Meskerem, or September 11, which marks the end of the rainy season and the beginning of spring.

More children are now entering the House of Hope, Children’s Hope transition home in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. As children prepare to take their medical examinations we hope to give referrals to families in coming weeks. Several dossiers have been received and it is exciting to see our new families completing their paperwork for submittal to Ethiopia.

The Ethiopia program remains a very popular program for adoptions and it continues to grow daily.

• There are 89 families in the Ethiopia program.
• 2 families will be returning from Ethiopia with their children this weekend.
• 4 children were adopted by our three pioneer families—three boys and one girl. All of the boys were 3- to 5 ½-months old and the girl was 2-years-old.

Children's Hope currently has 55 families approved for the Ethiopia program and two dossiers in country. The courts in Ethiopia are set to close August 5. The exact date has not been confirmed. The courts are scheduled to reopen mid-September; however upon reopening, adoptions will not be processed through the court until the beginning of October.

Since gaining our licensure to facilitate adoptions in Ethiopia April 5, Children’s Hope In Country Coordinator Tsegay Fisseha has been hard at work first acquiring and then staffing and furnishing our transition home in Addis Ababa, now officially named "House of Hope". This home within the capital city will provide care for a maximum of fifty children concurrently. Once a child is referred to a Children’s Hope adoptive family they will leave their orphanage or community to come into direct care and guardianship.

The news we have all been waiting for finally arrived early on April 5, Children’s Hope is officially licensed in Ethiopia. With the signature of the Ethiopian Ministry of Justice, Children’s Hope finalized the accreditation process as an international adoption and humanitarian aid agency in Ethiopia. Children’s Hope is only the seventh U.S. adoption agency to be licensed in the African country.

Ethiopia Workshop: Our first Ethiopia Parent Education Workshop will be held in St. Louis on March 24. A panel of experienced adoptive parents will discuss transracial/transcultural adoption issues, particularly those facing families adopting from Ethiopia. The video “Struggle for Identity”, in which adopted children tell their own stories regarding transracial adoption, will be shown in addition to a presentation by an Ethiopian gentleman sharing about Ethiopian culture. This meeting is for both St. Louis branch families as well as all others interested in adopting from Ethiopia. We hope to see you there!

Signs are Positive for License: It has been an agonizing wait for our license and approval for our Ethiopian adoption program. We remain optimistic since everything looks fine with our documents and we have not heard anything out of Addis Ababa that would make us think that the good news will be delayed much longer.

In the race to obtain Children’s Hope’s license in Ethiopia, we made it over one more hurdle the first week of February. Children’s Hope’s papers have been signed by the officials at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and now they have moved on to the final step of the process, the Ministry of Justice. With signatures from the Ministry of Justice, Children’s Hope will be licensed for adoption and humanitarian aid in Ethiopia. We are on the home stretch!