Papers Everywhere!

by Steve



We have sent in the application for our Home Study and are beginning to collect documents for our Dossier!

The Home Study is done by a third-party, non-profit organization that assigns us a social worker. These are the people that we actually meet with and talk to face to face.  The purpose of the Home Study is to verify that we are qualified to adopt. This will include background checks, several meetings, and checking our references. They say the more places we have lived and moved in our lives, the longer the background check will take. With Evie's international residences, we anticipate that this will take extra long.
The average time for the Home Study to be completed is 4-6 weeks. It costs about $1700.

The Dossier is the official document that is sent to the Ethiopian government. It includes everything from Birth Certificates to our Home Study and lots of official papers.
All these papers take time to collect and make sure everything is perfect. AWAA (our adoption agency) has assigned us a Family Coordinator. Her main job at this stage is to make sure our Dossier is all in order so that nothing is rejected once we send it to Ethiopia.
The average time for this process is 4-6 months. The cost widely varies because each document is different. For example, my passport needs to be renewed ($110), but Evie's is up to date.

You know how you feel when you go to get your drivers licence for the first time? Before they can give you that licence you need to get all those different documents. Then you can't find one or another of them so you need to get that first before you can even go get your licence. That is where we all begin to develop a dislike for governmental paperwork.
Emotionally, that is where we are at and will be for the next few months. AWAA has done their best to lay it out clearly and make things easy to understand, but it is quite overwhelming when we see the long list of things that need to be done.
Please continue to pray for us as we plod our way through this -that we will remember what great effort God went through to adopt us into His family.