Progress of Papers

We mailed our dossier to Washington, D.C. and paid a sweet little courier service to hand carry it between the Ethiopian Embassy and the US Department of State. I think it's amazing that if you pay someone enough they will walk around, carry your papers, and take care of you.

The courier mailed our dossier to CWA in North Carolina. We sent money from a few different places and made sure all of our agency fees were paid. Then they sent our dossier to Ethiopia and put us on the waiting list for our children.

Now, all we have to do is wait and a referral will come. How wonderful and easy. I know waiting is sometimes painful, but I am happy to simply wait.

Yesterday we went to get our immunizations. We still need to go back and get more done, but this time we got Typhoid fever, Hep A, Hep B, Polio, and DPT. We went to this wonderful clinic of nurses and doctors that volunteer once a month to give immunizations to people in ministry or going on humanitarian trips. We were going to pay $1400 at the Vanderbilt International Travel Clinic, but we are going to end up pay around half of that. It's wonderful for people to take care of each other like that. This is how the church should run, and then we wouldn't need the govenment to take care of the poor, etc. I'm just saying.

I talked to our new case worker at CWA early this week. She told me some really interesting statistics about my waiting time for a referral. Right now there are about 25 families with CWA who are waiting to get referrals. We are not the last people on this list. About half of them are waiting for girls, and half for boys. There are 3 or 4 other families who are waiting for twins (or sibling groups). One family wants a boy and a girl, the other wants two girls. We get referrals based on when we got on the waiting list and also based on whether a family is a good match for a child.

What a difficult job for the CWA staff. They look at photographs and medical records of a child and then decide where that child should live. They get it that God is in control, or else, I don't think they would be able to make decisions like that without suffering constant self-doubt.

Anyway, we are excited. It's like being pregnant.