Here I am, standing at the FedEx counter paying $68.43 for our original dossier and associated checks and money order to arrive at the Assistant Stork in Virginia by Saturday. I know that sounds crazy. Why would I pay to have it arrive at a business on a Saturday, you ask? Well, I spoke to Steve Morrison who runs the business with his wife and he informed me that if they receive it Saturday they will take it first thing Monday morning to the U.S. Department of State for authentication. He said they usually get it completed and returned the next day. Meaning, our completely authenticated dossier will be on its way to Children's House International by Tuesday or Wednesday at the latest.
Step 4: Children's House International sends the original authenticated dossier along with two notarized copies and one regular copy off to the Embassy of Ethiopia for final authentication and translation. Then we wait. And wait. And probably wait some more.
So....we will be waiting for what is called a "referral". We have to wait for all of the families ahead of us who have the same age and sex specifications for a child to receive a referral first. For example, our specifications are for a baby girl age range newborn to 18 months of age. She can also have a sibling boy or girl up to age 3 1/2. If a child like that enters the orphanage, then we receive a referral for her/them. A lot more happens once we receive and accept a referral but I will wait to get into that part.
As we wait for a referral, we hope to proceed with fundraising so that we can afford to accept a referral for two children. (Remember with two children, it is an additional $8000 - $9000). Total costs for one child range from approximately $29,000 - $32,000. While we have gone into this adoption planned and prepared, we just don't have that much money laying around. Also, as I noted in a previous post, the costs have risen since we started in January of 2010.
Keep a watch out, I will be doing more posts on our progress as well as some interesting posts about Ethiopia and its people.
Have you looked into assistance from the Army? A family in our Cadre at BYU was adopting, I vaguely remember them saying they got some assistance through the Air Force. Maybe check with Family Advocacy... Here is something I found on MilitaryOneSOurce searching for "adoption costs":
ReplyDeletehttp://www.militaryonesource.com/MOS/FindInformation/Category/Topic/Issue/Material.aspx?MaterialTypeID=9&MaterialID=15434
Love you guys!