I know several people check here regularly, so I wanted to explain this right away. I took down two of my posts because I found out they were beginning to cause a bit of panic among some of the adoptive community. There’s really nothing to panic about. There was a miscommunication somewhere along the line and a few people’s adoptions were affected. Unfortunately, this can happen with international adoption. My heart still breaks for the families and for the kids involved, but there’s no need for anyone else to worry. If you haven’t heard about it, then it doesn’t affect you. And it’s not something that should cause future problems since it was a one time communication problem.
There’s so much complexity to this process. Besides the adoption red tape and the immigration red tape, you’ve got translation issues, cultural differences to understand, and several different layers of people and agencies to work through. Sometimes it almost feels like playing whisper down the lane even when people are trying to keep everything straight on all sides. In many cases, you can’t really place blame anywhere when this sort of thing happens. It’s honest misunderstanding more often than not. And the more experience everyone gets, the less it will happen. Ethiopian adoption is still young as compared to many international adoption programs, and for its age it’s going quite well. It helps immensely that the people of Ethiopia and their government want very much to care for their children in any way they can, even if that means finding homes for them in another country. God bless them for loving their children enough to let them go.