Still waiting in Ethiopia
On Tuesday morning, we went to Awasa to meet up with the workers from Shalom, the orphanage there, to try to get things straightened out and see if it was possible to get back in time for our flight on Thursday. We arrived on Tuesday afternoon. At the time, we really didn't know where Julia's birthmother was. We were told that she was pretty transient and had left town. The social workers therefore took the grandmother, the next closest relative, along with three witnesses to the cabele to start the process of the relinquishment. I think the best way to describe the cabele is like the local tribal council. The problem was that the cabele actually knew that the mother was in town because he was paying for her to go to school to be a hair dresser and had seen her recently, so he rejected the grandmother's appearance to start the relinquishment. This happens a short while before we arrive in Awasa, so now we have the job of going to find the mother and getting her started in the process. We talked to the grandmother and she gave us a few places that she thought she could be, so we started running them down. After about the third place in running around town, our social worker found the mom and we explained what needed to be done. We went to the cabele, but by then it was 4:30 and they were going to be closing at 5:00, not enough time to complete everything that needed to be done.
We stayed the night in Awasa and they took her back the next morning, on Wednesday. They were able to complete the process there and then we needed to go to the local court to have the relinquishment completed locally by the lower court. For that, there were several documents that needed to be created, but the power had gone out at the orphanage where the computer was, so they couldn't just make the changes needed to the document templates that they had. Instead, they had a hard copy and needed to take it to a local shop where you could hire a secretary to create them anew. In all, there were about five or six pages, but that took over four hours to complete, with that being their only project happening at the time...Ugh! That process finally finished at 4pm and we rushed to the court, who was set to close at 5:00. They ended up staying until 6:00 to help us out by completing the decision and then going ahead and doing all of the additional signatures, stamps, and filing that have to happen in the legal proceedings.
Unfortunately, it was too late to drive back to Addis that night, so we stayed again in the hotel in Awasa and then left the next morning at 5am. The plan was to bring the mother with us so she could stand in front of the federal court in Addis and complete the process the next morning in the hope that we could then have the documents translated into English, take them the embassy, and maybe even get Julia's visa to get out of Ethiopia by our scheduled flight at 7:30pm that night. I found out at about 10:30 on Wednesday night that the mother had actually not committed to going with us on Thursday and instead had gone to stay the night with her boyfriend and wasn't willing to come to Addis on Thursday. We decided to try with the court on Thursday anyway as there wasn't anything further that could be done in Awasa, so we drove up, but the attorney said that the federal court wasn't willing to do anything without the mother in attendance, so that shot down the rest of our hopes for trying to get out of Ethiopia for several days. With Easter coming, offices were shutting down in the middle of the day on Thursday and won't re-open until Monday.
So, we've been hanging out in Addis at our hosts' guest house for a few days. At this point, we're waiting on the mother to fully agree and decide to come to Addis on Monday. We're hoping for Sunday night so we can possibly get into court on Monday, complete the process, obtain the visa and leave Monday night. We're not sure that it will be able to happen though as it sounds like the mother and her boyfriend are talking about driving themselves up to Addis on Monday, which would likely mean that the earliest we could get to court would be Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning. So much fun being at someone else's mercy, but I guess if that is what we have to do, we will do our best to be patient!
