Guess what?! Today we finally received our notice from USCIS about our Biometric Fingerprint appointments! We have 8am appointments on March 28th!! Check out the fancy heading on the letter. Isn't it funny that it looks like money? We are super thankful that we finally received something from them because we had mailed our application in at the beginning of January. I'm still not real sure what was happening with it during that time because on the forms, it says that they received it on February 28th. Weird huh? At any rate, ta dah! Here is mine!
Despite the confusion over what exactly will come to pass with the new changes from MOWA, we have seen many referrals and court dates coming through with our agency! Isn't that incredible? God is still working even when we can't see what is up around the bend. He knows and has everything in His hands. I am SO thankful for that. We have not received our official number for March but I will just share that our "unofficial" number is 56! Isn't that nuts? We've come a long way since we started at 93 back at the end of October!Some of you have asked what we have heard about Ethiopia lately and we still don't really have anything concrete. Here are the points that our agency informed us of that was discussed during the caucus call with the Department of State on Friday.
■Although this change has been supposedly confirmed to have gone into effect on March 10, 2011, there is no information available on what the process could look like moving forward, what cases it impacts, and if and for how long it will remain in effect.
■It was mentioned that cases already registered with the Ethiopian court could possibly experience up to an estimated 12 month delay. It was made very clear by the US Department of State that this was dependent on a number of factors, all of which are yet to be determined, i.e. how many cases are registered, what cases this change will impact, if this change continues to be in effect, etc.
■There is a vast amount of rumors going around related to this change, and none of them are able to be confirmed at this point.
■The head of MOWA has been terminated, effective next week, for unknown reasons.
■We are hearing that there will be meetings between the US Department of State, US Embassy, MOWA, network of ASP Foreign Service Providers, and Ethiopian government offices during the next week. We believe these meetings will begin on Monday, March 14th; however, there is no way to know if there will be concrete solutions that develop.
So, what can we do?
1. We can be in prayer for the meeting that will take place on Monday!
2. You can still sign the petition! They have suggested that we need 250,000 signatures. I just checked and there are like right at 35,000!! So here is a super quick link. You can copy and paste it and send to everyone you know! It takes less than one minute to sign the petition that the Joint Council on International Children's Services has put online. They will deliver this
petition to the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, so you need to act TODAY. Through
this simple act, your signatures will provide hope for the voiceless children of Ethiopia.
3. We can also just be praying for the country of Ethiopia as a whole. "At least one Christian was killed and others injured when thousands of Islamic extremists set fire to 59 churches and at least 28 homes in western Ethiopia in the past five days, Christian leaders said." This is very tragic. Here is the link to the article.
I signed!! Praying for you guys!!
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