Court Date Scoop

I've been having email problems for the last couple of days due to our Internet service provider installing a new server. I think all my emails are pretty much caught up now, and we've received no word on our court date. However, another family who traveled a few months ago on their pick up trip got some information from the attorney in Ethiopia and while I was not happy to hear the information, at least it is an explanation as to why we haven't heard anything yet.

Here is the scoop.

The agency we are with, Tree of Life (TOL), is a partner agency of Adoption Avenues. All our information comes from TOL. All our questions go through TOL. They handle all our paperwork, collect our money, etc. However, Adoption Avenues is the accredited agency in Ethiopia, so although TOL does all the work for TOL clients, it is all done via Adoption Avenues. This means they use the Adoption Avenues in country attorney, who is responsible for submitting all the necessary paperwork to the Ethiopian courts.

Once the paperwork is submitted, it take 3 weeks to obtain a court date. However, because Adoption Avenues has more clients now, the attorney waits until he has several files to submit to the courts and submits them all at once. He does this once every 3-4 months. As a result, some families may be waiting 3 or 4 months post-referral, while other families may have just gotten their referrals and be submitted right away because now the attorney has a large group he can submit at one time.

Now, I understand the attorney wanting to save himself trips and time, but he is doing this at the expense of the children sitting in Toukoul without their families and I just can't understand why anyone would want a child to stay in an orphanage any longer than is absolutely necessary. That does not make any sense to me at all.

In addition, until children leave the orphanage, there is no room for other children to move in which means families waiting on their referrals wait that much longer.

All this information means is that we have no idea if we'll get word of our court date soon or if it will be 3 months from now. All we can do is wait and all Naomi can do is wait.