What happens next?

Sorry for this boring procedural info, but lots of people have asked us what happens next. Why can't we fly out there, scoop the babies up and be home by the end of the week?

The short answer is that everyone from Britain who adopts from Ethiopia needs to do so independently. There are no accredited agencies that we can work with, so we are responsible for lodging all our own paperwork and complying with all the complicated legalities that surround adoption in any country. (Fortunately, we will have some help!) In Ethiopia, there are two main stages to the process. The first is:

Having a Court Hearing. For the babies to be legally ours, we need to have a court hearing and a judge needs to decree that we are their new parents. Until this happens, the babies are NOT officially our children, and need to remain in the care of the orphanage (and we can't put any pictures of them on this blog or anywhere else on the internet). So, when we arrive, we can visit the babies during the day, but we cannot take them back to our hotel to live with us until after our court hearing.

So how do we get a court date? We need to apply for a hearing, and then wait for a date to be allocated. The courts in Ethiopia are shut until early October, so we won't even find out when our court date will be until probably around the middle of October. Late October is the very earliest that we could possibly have our court date, and it could be much later than this.

John is flying home on the 25th of September to go back to work, but will need to return to Ethiopia for our court hearing. He will then stay out in Ethiopia for the rest of the trip.

If our court hearing is successful, the babies will be ours in the eyes of the Ethiopian government, but not the British government. We will be allowed to take custody of them at this point, but to bring them back into the country, we need to enter stage two:

Getting visas for the babies. The babies are Ethiopian citizens, and will need visas to come into the UK. To get their visas, we will first need to get copies of their birth certificates, and then we will need to have Ethiopian passports issued for them. Once we have passports, we can apply for British visas. This second stage, when the babies are legally ours but we can't yet come home, will probably take about another month.

So, that's where all the time will be going. At the moment, it all feels pretty daunting (especially the part where we begin our parenting careers in a hotel room for a month, approx 15,000 miles from the nearest Tesco) but I know we will be glad that we were able to spend an extended time in the country where our babies were born. This time tomorrow we should be on a plane!