Yesterday I talked with Natalie, our caseworker at Gladney, for about an hour and a half. She helped me fill out more paper work and answered lots of questions. She is so nice, helpful, and responds so quickly to email...LOVE it! She also walked me through the next several stages of our process and what all goes into those and what will happen. Here is a general breakdown of what I learned.
We are still waiting for our approval letter from the US Dept of Citizenship and Immigration Services and our appointment to go be fingerprinted. We should be getting this anytime in the next 2-3 weeks. We will send a notarized copy of this letter to complete our dossier. (dosser- fancy word that means gigantic amount of super duper official, certified paperwork that gets translated and sent to Ethiopia) The dossier is different from the adoption application because the application goes to our agency and stays there. The dossier goes to Ethiopia and basically becomes our file there.
The other crazy part about our dossier is that it has to be authenticated 4 times! Basically signed off by someone official 4 times. The first one is a local notary. Thanks to Liz for helping us out big time at Amber Contracting! The next three are the Secretary of State, US Dept of State, and Ethiopian Embassy in Washington, DC. After that it is sent to Ethiopia to be translated by Gladney's in country representatives into Amharic.
Once our dossier gets to the Ethiopian embassy in DC we officially go on to the waiting list for a child to be referred to us. Right now for a child 0-12 months (which is our preference) the wait is about 9.5 months. I asked Natalie what takes so long and here is what she told me.
Gladney (our adoption agency) has contracts with 6 orphanages in Ethiopia. 3 government ones and 3 private ones. There are a large number of people adopting right now which slows the process down although this is a good thing. Another good thing is that there are constantly increased requirements and more checks/balances to make sure everything is legit. While there is a huge number of orphans in Ethiopia - not all of them are available for adoption. Some of them still live in their communities or in other awful places, not in orphanages. In addition there are children that are in orphanages that haven't be relinquished by their birth family. (this is appalling to me!)
More that I learned to come..
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