Not much new on the adoption front for us......it seems that wait times continue to get a little longer. There's really no way to know if this trend will continue or not. During this time of waiting there will not be much to report about our personal adoption - we will not really hear anything until the day they call us with our referral. We are involved in a great yahoo group where we can follow along with other families who are also adopting through our agency from Ethiopia. Through their journeys and wait times coupled with the information on wait times our agency gives we can try to guesstimate what our wait time will be. Right now, the wait (from the time our papers went to Ethiopia (DTE) until we get a referral) is about 9 months which would put us at getting a referral sometime in July. There is really no way of knowing for sure, so it's just a guess.

While we wait I continue to contemplate what God would have me do on behalf of orphans. He has certainly given me a heart for them and I feel there is something else for me to do...I just don't know what it is. I will continue to seek out what it might be. In the meantime, I hope to encourage all of you to also think about the same.

Below is part of an article I found about Ethiopia and it's orphans:

Ethiopia to see sharp rise in orphans running households: NGO

Nov 7, 2008

ADDIS ABABA (AFP) - Ethiopia will by 2010 see a four-fold increase in the number of orphaned children aged between nine and 19 who are heading families due to AIDS, poverty and conflict, a local NGO said on Friday.

Some 225,000 households will be run by children, up from 77,000 in 2005, Addis Ababa-based African Child Policy Forum (ACPF) said in a report.

"This is going to be an explosive problem," said Assefa Bequele, the agency's director.

"In some households, the oldest child is also the principal care-giver to a terminally-ill parent," said the report.

Ethiopia is one of the world's poorest countries. The government estimates that 1.5 million Ethiopians are infected with HIV, while the World Health Organization says nearly 2.8 million are infected.

Can you imagine? Children running homes.
My intention is certainly not to sound preachy here, but it is to make you think. It's to make us all think. I really do believe that God wants to use us to care for "the least of these". He tells us so. Children and those who cannot care for themselves are closest to God's heart. They are the people Jesus spent most of his time with. Do our lives look like Jesus' in this way?

Please join me in searching for how God wants us to respond to what we now know. If you are interested in continuing the dialogue and sharing ideas, please leave a comment - I'd love to hear from you!