bodhi tree swaying

We just sighted land in our adoption voyage. Our adoption agency called to tell us that we’ve been matched with a 3 1/2 month [I had "year" as a typo earlier, but just look at how wee she is] old baby girl in Ethiopia. We’ve decided to call her Maia Bereket Sering.

Maia is the name we chose for her. Maia is a goddess of spring, and the month of May is named after her. It’s also a variant of Maya, which is the name of the Buddha’s mother (it means “compassion”). Then of course there’s the famous Maya Angelou, the African-American poet, whose books I’ve found very inspiring.

Bereket is her given name, and means “blessing” in Amharic. Bereket is an orphan. Her mother died in childbirth and her father died of malaria last summer.

We’ll be traveling to Ethiopia in approximately two months in order …

People keep asking how our plans to adopt an orphan from Ethiopia are going. I keep telling them that they’ll keep getting the same answer for the next several months that they’ve been getting since Aug 2: our dossier has been submitted and we’ll waiting to hear something.

Of course as we wait things are moving forwards and we’re slowly creeping up the list of would-be adoptive parents. Just the other day (Jan 2) a couple whose dossier went in on April 4 (I think) got their referral. So if things hold steady then we should get our referral in May and travel to Ethiopia in June or July. Nothing’s guaranteed, however.

My wife is going quietly crazy waiting, while I’m happily enjoying my last relatively free months.

Here’s a short video posted by a family who just traveled to Ethiopia.

Now the family you’ll see are not the adoptive parents, but a family who filmed a video for the parents, who will be traveling over soon. Here’s the story.

The adoptive family are going through Wide Horizons for Children, which is the same adoption agency we’re using. This was a dramatic adoption for the family involved because just after getting their referral they’d been told by a doctor in the US that judging by the clinical measurements there was a good chance of severe developmental abnormalities. This of course threw the family into an emotional tail-spin since they’d asked for and expected a child with normal developmental possibilities and aren’t in a position to be able to care for a child with special needs.

My wife’s been following the whole story on the Wide Horizons’ discussion group on …

The last we’d heard from our adoption agency, our planned adoption of an orphan from Ethiopia was going to take considerably longer than originally forecast. We now think that their outlook was pessimistic.

My wife has been keeping an eye on how long it’s been taking couples who contribute to the Wide Horizons for Children Yahoo Group to get ther referrals, and at the moment the time between submission of the dossier to Ethiopia and being referred a child is holding steady at seven to seven and a half months. That would put us on track for getting our referral around March, which is only a couple of months later than originally forecast. If the seven to seven and a half months pattern keeps up, we should be travelling to Ethiopia around May next year.

Just this week we got some unsettling news about the adoption. We’d been told in the middle of August that it was most likely we’d get a referral from Ethiopia in about five months, which would have been January, with our trip to Addis being one to two months thereafter. Now it seems that it’ll be nine to eleven months from now — which is June to August — again with travel one to two months beyond the referral date (August to October). And it’s possible that it could be even later.

My wife was very upset with this news, and I’m not too happy about it myself. I realize that I’d built up an expectation around the dates, and it’s painful to have to readjust. Still, the only thing we can do to stay sane is to let go of our expectations. There’s nothing we can do to make the …

I wonder (see post below) how welcome I will be in China when my wife and I travel there next year to pick up the baby girl we’re adopting?

Last night marked another significant step forward in a process that started many months ago: our dossier of information was sent to the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., from whence it will be returned to us so that we can forward it to our adoption agency, who will then send it to the Chinese government. As you can see, there are still several steps to go before the Chinese government considers us as adoptive parents for a Chinese child, but this marks the first time that all of our paperwork has been together in one place.

What happens after the paperwork goes to China? As things currently stand, we’ll wait around nine months while the Chinese government matches us with a child and

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My wife and I decided some time ago to adopt a baby girl from China. Shrijnana has long felt that she preferred to provide a home for a child who needed one than to bring another child into the world, and once we started talking about having a child I started to see things the same way. I was particularly persuaded about this after seeing a National Geographic DVD called The Lost Girls of China. The program is about China’s one child policy and how this has led to the widespread abandonment of baby girls, thousands of whom grow up in orphanages. Seeing the older girls in the orphanages was very moving and I realized very strongly that every child needs and deserves a home. So that’s what we’re going to do.

We’re adopting through an agency called Wide Horizons for Children. This week represented a big step forward:

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