Ethiopia Court Trip: Travel and Day 1 Sunday to Tuesday

It's been over a month since we got home from our court trip so I figured it's about time wrote about it, you know, before I forget most of it.

Our trip started Sunday afternoon when we took our boys up to my parents who were going to watch them for the week. It was their nap time so we put them in their beds and told them to have good naps and that we'd see them in a week. Hoping that they'd understand at least a little of what we told them and that the fun of being at Grandma and Grandpas would be enough to help them be happy when they woke up a few hours later to find out that Mom and Dad were gone.

Nothing like starting the trip saying goodbye to our babies. Sheesh.

My dad took us to the airport (Thanks, Dad!) and we flew to D.C. that night. We stayed overnight in a hotel and then caught a flight to Addis Ababa the next morning around 11:00. The

flight lasted 13 hours. For a 13 hour flight it actually wasn't that bad. We passed the time watching movies, playing games, and trying to get in a little sleep.

We landed at 8:30 AM in Ethiopia. We walked off the plane onto the tarmac and then onto a bus...which then drove about 100 feet to the building where our luggage was. Silly airport.

The airport in Ethiopia! That's not our plane. It's behind us.

After getting our Visas (we were one of the first in line so it only took a few minutes) we waited in line for customs. We remembered to change our money at the airport as the exchange rate is best there. Which is weird to us because in every other country we've visited the exchange rate at the airport is the absolute worst. Oh well, when in Rome, er, Ethiopia...

We collected our luggage and then walked out of the airport. We found our driver, Abebe, holding a sign with our name on it, but he knew who we were before we even found him. Apparently we look like your typical adoptive couple arriving in Ethiopia. Yay for us!

So, to recap, we left our house on Sunday night, flew out of D.C. on Monday morning and arrived in Addis Tuesday morning.

Abebe drove us to the guest house where we unloaded our bags. Here are a few shots of what we saw on the drive.

Stores and stuff.

More stores and people, always lots of people walking everywhere.

And, of course, donkeys on the highway next to the oil tanker... Animals not pictured here, but equally present on the roadways: goats and cows.

We were staying at a guest house called Oziopia. It's run by a lady and her three kids, the oldest of which is Abebe. We splurged on this trip and got the guest suite which included a room with two beds and our very own bathroom. The other two rooms in the guest house shared a tiny bathroom at the end of the hall. When I say tiny I mean tiny. Picture a sink, a toilet (placed diagonally in the corner so it would fit) and a shower head in the middle of the ceiling. It was so tiny that the shower was the bathroom.

After unloading our luggage we called our agency contact, Elena. She told us to come to Layla House, our agency's orphanage, and we would go to Hilawe to see Yema. At least I think that's what she said on the phone. I did not do well understanding anyone's English over the phone.

The orphanage where Yema is staying is located in a newer part of the city and there are a lot of buildings being built in that area.

Here's Hilawe, Yema's orphanage. It's the building right in the middle with the orange terraces. Note the unfinished cement structures to the left of it and the big field with construction stuff to the right of it.

We pulled up to the gate and waited for the guard to let us in. Almost every home and building in Addis has a wall around it with a gate that is manned by a security guard of sorts.

We pulled into the yard and went inside.

Here's what the courtyard looks like out front. The gate is on the right.

There's always laundry to be washed and dried!

The orphanage has 3 floors and Yema's room was on the third floor. On the second floor we had to put little booties over our shoes so we wouldn't track dirt into the living areas. When we got onto the third floor and walked into Yema's room we could see her laying on a mattress playing with a rattle. I bent down to pick her up and the rattle got knocked out of her hand and hit her in the face. Not the best first impression from Mom.

Meeting my baby girl for the first time!

Zack meeting the girl who is going to have him wrapped around her finger in no time...

Yema whimpered a little bit at the strangers who swooped in and started doting on her. She kind of gave us stunned and confused looks for most of that day. We did our best to help her feel comfortable with her new parents. However, that day happened to be the day she needed one of her vaccinations so we got to take her to the hospital to get them. "Hi! We're you're new mom and dad! We're going to take you to get a shot!" Yeah. First the rattle hit her face and now she's getting poked by a needle.

Zack held her on the drive over. Gripping Daddy's thumb...so cute!

Such a sweetheart.

Here we are at the hospital.

I got to hold her on the drive home and she fell sleep in my arms. :)

When we got back to the orphanage we handed her to a nanny and then went back to Layla.

From there we, and another couple who was there for court this week, Eva and Brian, went to the Lucy Restaurant with Elena for lunch. The restaurant had Ethiopian and Italian food. I honestly don't remember what I ate but I'm pretty sure it was Italian. The Lucy Restaurant is named after Lucy, the famous skeleton found in Ethiopia that is reported to be the oldest found in the world. There's a museum with a replica of the skeleton next door to the restaurant but for some reason we didn't visit it. We, apparently, were just there to eat.

After eating we went to the Ethiopian History Museum. Keep in mind that we hadn't slept since early Monday morning and it was now Tuesday afternoon. Add the time change and we'd been up for over 24 hours.

And now we were going to a museum.

I had flashbacks of my first day in London with my Study Abroad group touring the local neighborhood, looking at Greek Cathedrals and wanting to strangle my professor who was taking us on that walking torture-tour. I was soooo tired.

I felt similar in the museum. I tried to be interested in what I saw but it was so hard. Who thought it was a good idea to take us to a museum on our first day?!

Here we are looking at pictures and displays and stuff.

Here's one of the many folk tales on display. This one was one of the less ...disturbing... ones.

The museum is actually located in Haile Selassie's old house. If you don't know who he is, he's a famous Ethiopian leader. You should learn more about him. But not here. This is a picture of his bedroom. Fancy.

Here we are on the steps of the museum. I'm pretty sure we're holding each other up.

After the museum we went back to the guest house where we got to take a nice nap.

This is a shot of one of the squares in Addis. The lion is the Lion of Judah. I think. I was trying really hard not to fall asleep. This was the theme of all our drives home at the end of the day while in Ethiopia.

After our nap we had dinner at the guest house: Real Ethiopian food as well as egg rolls and french fries. Weird, but good.

We went to bed early that night, looking forward to seeing our little girl again the next day!

It's better than bad, it's Good!

I think that adoptions are to judges what tithing settlement is for LDS Bishops - Happy moments in the midst of often...stressful moments, though chances are good and hopes are high that I'll never be able to ratify either claim.  As it turns out, the happiest events in my family have taken place in temples and courts (and once in our living room, but we were a skyped extension of a courtroom that day!).

If there is anything that can strike more terror into your soul than a court summons, it's a court summons in another country.  I took Carrie to Tijuana with me on a business trip once, and one evening while we were driving around El Centro we got pulled over by the police.  They asked me to get out of the car.  I had terrible visions of them taking me away on unfounded charges while the other officer yelled at my wife in Spanish as though that would help her understand what he was saying, and then leaving her there all alone at night in a place she didn't know with a language she didn't speak and, well...Tijuana (shudder).  Luckily they were just verifying that I had purchased Mexican car insurance for my rental car, but in that moment I was as grateful as I've ever been to have the less than perfect USA law enforcement and judicial system.

Today we found out that we have a court date in Ethiopia!  We don't know what the date is, thanks to some e-mail confusion, but we know that it is towards the end of February, and we know we'll still get to go pick my Dad up like we've been planning for 13 years...  Needless to say, we are super excited to go to Court in Ethiopia, and we aren't the least bit terrified that one of us will be Tijuana'd.

Actually I just checked the dates that Carrie and I guessed the day we went off hold. Carrie guessed 10/21 as our referral date and that was within a week of our actual referral date.  I guessed 2/21 as our court date, and it looks like that will be within a week of our actual court date.  Here's hoping that Carrie's Embassy date guess is right (3/21)!

Donations

Zack and I found out last week that we have been submitted to court in Ethiopia! We are now waiting for a court date and should find that out this week. (Crossayo fingers!!) Our agency told us that they anticipate a court date sometime at the end of January or the beginning of February.

That means we'll probably be flying over to Ethiopia in just a few weeks!! Woot!

We found out that Yema has been moved to her original orphanage and will stay there until we can bring her home. We recently received a list of items that this orphanage needs and we'd love to bring some of them when we visit for our court date.

We would love it if any of you would like to donate some items (or money and then we'd buy the items) for us to take over.

Right now the orphanage needs:

• Diapers (cloth and disposable)
• Clothes for school-aged children and infants
• Toys (I'd suggest nothing with batteries.)

If you can and are willing to donate any of these items we would think you were awesome and we'd love you forever. Really.

You can give us a call and we'll come get them from you or you can bring them to our house.

Thanks everyone!

Big News!

Over here in the Evans household, all it takes is one phone call for our lives to change forever.

We are happy to announce that we had one of those life-changing phone calls yesterday!

We were called by our international adoption agency, AAI, with a referral for a baby girl!

Before I start with the story of how it all happened, let me just make things really clear from the beginning:

We are adopting a baby girl from Ethiopia!! Her name is Yematawerk. She is about 4 months old. And she is gorgeous.

Okay, now for the story.

After we got more concrete news that the adoption of Caleb's birthsister just wasn't going to happen, we decided to stop thinking about adoption for a while. You know, give ourselves a break from all the craziness, stress and roller coaster emotions.

Yeah. That lasted for maybe a week I think.

Then it was conference weekend. October Conference weekend. This is a very special time for our family. For the past 3 years October Conference weekend was the weekend where we learned what Heavenly Father had in mind for our family.

October 2008: We felt we were supposed to start the adoption process.

October 2009: We felt that we were supposed to adopt domestically and not wait for our Ethiopian adoption to go through first. A week or so later we found out about Caleb.

October 2010: We were waiting anxiously to see if we were going to be chosen to adopt a little baby boy who was due to be born in Pennsylvania in a few weeks. The next day we found out Noah was born and he was going to be ours!

October 2011: We felt very strongly that we were supposed to continue our Ethiopian adoption and that we should get off hold.

So that's what we did. We initially decided to wait a month or so and then jump back into it, but last Thursday we felt strongly that we shouldn't wait. So last Friday I called our agency and told them we were going off hold. That's when I found out all our paperwork wasn't up to date. We had redone it all in March but then we went on hold before AAI processed it and sent it to Ethiopia. And now it was 6 months old and they didn't want to submit 6-month old documents to Ethiopia. They wanted us to do it all AGAIN. That means we had to get bank statements, reference letters, doctors forms, and police letters (all notarized). Bleh. That can take weeks and weeks. They said that if we could do our part in a couple weeks that they'd hurry and get their part done in a couple weeks so we'd be able to maybe get a referral by the end of November. Again, bleh. We felt that we had a little girl waiting for us NOW and we didn't have weeks and weeks to get our paperwork up to date. So we got to work, determined to get our part done as quickly as possible. Phone calls, emails, meetings- you name it. We did it.

And here's what happened:

Monday we got the police letters (our city is AWESOME). We called the doctor and were told that we needed to schedule appointments for physicals and they couldn't get us in until next week. Bleh. We prayed hard that things would work out, and obstacles would be removed. We prayed that if we needed to get our paperwork in by a certain date in order to be referred OUR daughter, that it would just happen somehow.

Tuesday we picked up a reference letter from our awesome friend, Nate, who has written probably 10 letters for us by now. We talked to the doctor personally (we were there for Noah's 1 year appointment) and he said we didn't need physicals and that he would get our forms filled out the next day. We went to the bank and got the letters we needed from them. We also got an email from our agency saying that they would still take us off hold and we would be considered for a referral even though our paperwork wasn't up to date because they knew we were working on it!

Wednesday we picked up the doctor's forms, picked up a reference letter from our other awesome friend, Jennifer (Who also happens to be my visiting teacher. She takes magnifying your calling to an unreachable height, people.), and then we took all the papers to FedEx and had them sent next-day air.

Thursday AAI received our documents.

Friday we got a call with a referral for our little girl!

I know a lot of you don't understand the forms and paperwork and all that goes into the adoption process, but believe me when I say that getting all of our paperwork to AAI in less than a week was nothing short of a miracle. Heavenly Father has a plan for our family and He made it so things fell into place. I know it.

And now we know we have a sweet baby girl waiting for us in Ethiopia. She's been in care since the middle of June so we were able to find quite a few pictures of her that traveling families had taken.

If you want to see a picture of our little girl, just ask. We can't post a picture of her on the Internet because the Ethiopian Government wants to protect her privacy. But we CAN show you a picture in person. :) She is A.DOR.ABLE.

The next step is to submit our file to the Ethiopian Court. It takes about 4-8 weeks to submit the paperwork and the average time to get a court date is 3 to 5 months.

Now the real waiting begins!

Because it isn't nice to keep you in the dark...

We had to cancel our trip to Florida. It's a long story, or maybe it's not. The end of the story is (we think) the birthfather appeared and decided to parent the baby. We're preeettty sure that's true. Either way, we aren't adopting this baby.

We were not really surprised by the turn of events. Things hadn't felt right for quite some time and we knew something was up. To be truly honest, even at the beginning, even when we agreed to adopt her, even after we signed papers and all that jazz, even then we had a gut feeling that this just might not work out. But we both felt that we were supposed to go through it anyway.

We're not sure why.

Maybe something will happen in the future with this little girl. Maybe this was something Caleb needed us to do. Maybe we had to learn a few lessons that wouldn't have come any other way. And maybe this just puts us in the right time-frame to adopt our next child.

Who knows?

All we do know is that we were supposed to go through this. We're sad we don't have this little girl as we know that she is not going to be raised in the best environment, but we trust that Heavenly Father has a plan for us and this little girl and maybe it's just not the same plan.

Update on Babygirl

For those of you who were wondering, we did finally get our tax return. (Yay!)

And now I thought I'd update ya'll on what's going on with our adoption.

As most of you know (I think. ...that cryptic post threw some of you for a loop.), we're planning on adopting Caleb's birth-sister this summer. She's due on September 1st. We were positive she'd come early since Caleb came early and so did his birth-siblings. Well, this girl has decided to be different. She's 38 weeks along as of today.

We're currently just waiting for a call (or email? ...text?) from the attorney to let us know when she's arrived.

We keep in regular contact with the birthmom, Cynthia, who, of course, is Caleb's birthmom as well. This has been good and bad. We're really glad we've been able to talk with her as we never had any contact with her when we adopted Caleb. We've been able to get a few pictures of her which we've wanted for a long time. It's been good to hear her talk about Caleb and her life now.

As would be expected, this is a highly emotional time of her life and, from what we've gathered, she doesn't have a lot of support. Since the adoption is through an attorney she doesn't even have a social worker to talk to when things are rough. We've been able to step into that role a little bit, but it's a little difficult seeing as, you know, we're the hopeful adoptive parents. It's hard to be unbiased.

We're hopeful that when the baby comes everything will work out and this little girl will go where she's meant to go. Like we tell almost everyone we talk to about it, adoption is never a done deal until papers are signed and the baby is in our arms.

While we wait for the arrival of this little girl we just ask that you keep her and Cynthia in your prayers. Hopefully the next post will be a baby announcement!

Inefficiency

These are the facts:

The government is giving a tax credit to those who adopt.

The tax credit is a lot of money, at least to us.

In order to get the tax credit you have to prove you adopted a child in the past year.

This means you need to give them proof. Proof is an adoption decree and receipts that prove you spent all the money you said you spent.

You'd think that would be simple.

Enter the IRS.

Here's what is happening with our tax credit and, from what I've read, many many adoptive couples tax credits.

We sent the required documents with our tax return.

A month later we got a letter saying that we are being audited (only for the adoption tax credit part) and could we please send proof of adoption plus receipts?

We got two of these letters, actually. One addressed to me and one to Zack.

A week or so later we got another letter saying that they checked everything, they found a mistake, they fixed the mistake (There was no mistake, btw. Their correction was the same as our original numbers.) and they would be sending us our tax return within 4 to 6 weeks.

Okay.

4 to 6 weeks later .....no tax return.

We called them and here's more or less how the conversation went:

Us: Why haven't we gotten our tax return?

Them: You need to send us proof of adoption and receipts.

Us: You told us we didn't need to do that.

Them: Oh, that wasn't us, that was a different department.

Us: ?????

Us: Why are there two different departments in the IRS sending out contradictory letters to people? Don't you guys communicate?

Them: ?????

Us: We already sent in proof with our tax return. Why do we have to send it again?

Them: When we send things to the auditing department we only send the return, not all your paperwork.

Us: Wh..Wh..Wh.. Why? Why? Why? Why? Never mind....

Trying to figure out why they do it this way makes my brain hurt.

So, now we have to resend our paperwork so the auditing department can verify it and decide if we really adopted Caleb in 2010.

Oh, I forgot the best part. A couple days ago we got a bill from the IRS for all the time they have (not) spent auditing us. Fortunately, the nice person we talked to on the phone told us it was coming and to disregard it. I only hope the bill came from her department.

Oh, Government, you always know the most efficient ways to do things. I can't wait until you are in charge of my health care.