This means our Dossier is officially in Ethiopia!!!!!! I checked our tracking number with FedEx the other night and it showed that our dossier had finally been delivered to our agency in Ethiopia. We are so excited, and it means our wait can officially begin. It's hard explaining this process to people (especially Caleb). He thinks that as soon as our dossier is in Ethiopia we can go and get sister. We have had to explain to him over and over that now we just wait and it could be a long time before we can go get sister.
This brings me to my first major prayer request! There was a new process put into place by the US embassy regarding Ethiopian adoptions that came into effect in September (right during the Ethiopian court closure period). Since court closure our agency has not had a single child referred to a family! I have heard that this is all just from a backlog of new paperwork on existing children and that the courts are working on all of the new paperwork and eventually referrals will come though. However, from our end, this is very frustrating. We get a number each month now that we are a waiting family (so we should get our first number January 1st. Back in August the wait list was about 115-120 people, which is long, but with 5-10 referrals a month (which seems to be the average) it seemed do-able. However with no referrals being given at all since July, the wait list has grown to almost 170 people! This again would be do-able if referrals were given and there was some movement on the list. But since there has been no movement, I am in a place of frustration and it seems really lame to start my wait already frustrated. So please please pray for major movement in the next few weeks! Also please pray that God will grant me a patient heart that I can endure cheerfully whatever comes my way.
Another prayer request is for our "adoption finances". We have depleted our adoption savings with getting our home study and dossier to Ethiopia. Now we are in the process of saving and fundraising to replenish our adoption account. We won't owe anything again until we get a referral (which as mentioned above, may be a long time) but we still want to be ready when that time comes. We currently have two "fundraisers" underway.
We have been making steady money the past 3 months with our Amazon link, found on this page to the right. It is quite an awesome and easy way to fund raise. You can click on our link (to the right) and then do your browsing and purchasing on Amazon as usual. Then we get a percentage (around 6%) of the proceeds from whatever you bought. It doesn't cost the users anything! And we all know that this time of year people are constantly buying things on Amazon. November was a good month for us and we made about $180! That's pretty great, and thanks to everyone who has used the link. This month we are up past $150, and hope to surpass last month! We will continue to have this link available until we have completed our adoption, so feel free to continue using it for all of your Amazon needs! Feel free to share it with your friends and family that you know use Amazon a lot!
Our second fundraiser is that we have set up an adoption account through AdoptTogether. This is a non-profit organization where you can make tax deductible donations to help deffer some of the costs of our adoption. This link is also to the right if you are interested in looking into that option of support!
As the year progress we hope to have a few more fund raisers. I think we are going to do a garage sale again at the Tapps Island garage sale as that was very successful last summer. So if you have goods that you want to donate to us, let us know! I will keep you posted if we plan anything else!
As always, thank you so much for your prayers and for all of your wonderful support! We really appreciate you and feel so loved by you all!
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