Dagnabit, Ethiopia.

If you keep up with adoption stuff, you've heard (from various entities, articles and blogs) that Ethiopia's slowing things down a bit (more specifically, one estimate is that they're scaling back from processing 40 adoptions per day to just five per day). Sometimes countries do this to reevaluate their processes and regulations. Sometimes they do this because things are getting a little loosey-goosey and they need to reign things in a little or perhaps they've bitten off more than they can chew and they need to catch up. Sometimes they do this because there's political strife or unrest there. Whatever the reason, it's a mess to adoptions that are in process. So, lucky for us, ours is not in process.

We're very fortunate that we haven't started our dossier and even more fortunate (thank you, Lord) that we didn't hop right on filing the immigration paperwork. This is the perfect time to change course, if need be. JD and I aren't convinced that switching countries is necessary (yet) and neither is our social worker (we had a conference call with her today). But it is a good time to pause (ahhh...pauses, so many pauses), do some research, ask some questions and see if anything is resolved in Ethiopia while we do so.

The logical question is, "So what if Ethiopia remains stalled and doesn't pick back up?"

Well, we're considering other countries as a back-up plan. Colombia is one, but requires a several week stay in-country, so we had originally ruled that one out. Philippines were an option, but they have apparently slowed down a lot over the last many months. Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Rawanda are others. We should know more in the next several days. For now, we'll just sit tight and count our blessings that we were not too far in to reassess the situation.

I'll keep you posted!

Oh! And thank you to those of you who've purchased t-shirts! You're awesome. :)