Some good news!

As you all know, parents adopting from Ethiopia had their world rocked 12 days ago when the Ministry of Woman's Affairs (MOWA) announced that they would reduce the amount of adoptions they process daily to five starting on March 10th. What you may not know is that a few days later the director of MOWA and many other staff members had their jobs terminated.

Since all this has been going on our agency has been relentless in finding out what's happening, working towards rectifying these horrible changes made and keeping us informed. Today we received another update.... and this time the update was positive.

And since I'm horrible at re-communicating things, I'll just do a bit of copy and pasting!

At this time, all Foreign Staff on the ground in Ethiopia are reporting that MOWA has completed their staffing changes and are now currently working at full capacity to complete those adoption cases currently re-scheduled or assigned a court appointment through the courts of Addis Ababa. Our staff believe this to be around 800 cases they are working at full force to complete with no restrictions on the number of cases processed each day. This is great news! We are thrilled to hear these drastic changes do not seem to be going into full effect.

We are also pleased to report that for new cases moving forward; it appears the original changes proposed by MOWA will not be implemented to the degree of 5 cases a day. At this time it is unknown whether or not MOWA will issue a formal statement regarding how they will process cases in the future, but from all discussions it will not be a drastic decrease from before. Through the continued work, meetings, and advocacy of many Foreign Staff members in Ethiopia, it appears any future changes within the case processing for MOWA will avoid sweeping and disproportionate alterations to the number of cases processed each day. Rather, the hope is that MOWA, Joint Council, Adoption Service Providers, the US Department of State and other NGO organizations can come together to support the government of Ethiopia in strengthening the process for ethical adoptions to continue while also improving the general social structures to assist with family preservation in Ethiopia. This plan was acknowledged in the recent posting by the US State Department this morning at http://adoption.state.gov/news/ethiopia.html. We understand the US Department of State cannot issue a formal statement without MOWA issuing a retraction. Based on the information we are receiving, MOWA is concentrating on processing the current adoptions and the new staff is not focused on numbers, but doing their jobs.

There was definitely quite a bit of sweet relief in our house this evening. And while we don't know exactly what this means; it does mean that instead of choosing an asinine number randomly, MOWA will be working to help the children.

And that's what really matters in all of this.

Thanks for your continued support and prayers!

Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. -1 Thessalonians 5:16-18