Submitted to Embassy

After more than seven long weeks of waiting we were finally submitted to the US Embassy on Wednesday, February 1st!!  This was a big step toward bringing Nathan home!  At this point we are waiting for the embassy to clear us to travel and get his visa.  If all goes well we hope to be traveling in 3-4 weeks.  We are really praying that Nathan will be home by his first birthday which is March 14th.  If the embassy does not think that our case is clearly approvable it will be sent to Nairobi to be reviewed there which could add 1-3 months to our wait to bring him home.  Please pray that our case will not be sent to Nairobi and that Nathan will come home SOON!!  We are so thankful for all of the support and encouragement we've received during this very tough wait!

Dubai

We made it to Dubai early yesterday morning.  Our hotel is really nice and the beach and weather are wonderful!  It is also really nice to not have to worry about food being safe to eat and water being safe.  All Will wants to do is "dig, dig, dig".  We spent a couple hours on the beach in the early afternoon allowing Will to dig and look for seashells.  Alison and Will even got to take a quick camel ride along the beach!  From the beach in front of our hotel we can see the famous Burj al Arab hotel and the Palm. 

Will took a good nap after the beach then we took a cab to the Dubai Mall.  It has an aquarium and underwater zoo and an ice skating rink inside and is the biggest mall in the world.  We had a good time walking around there.  Right by the mall is the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world.  We watched a fountain show in front of the Burj Khalifa...a dancing water show synchronized to the song "Thriller".  Will loved the dancing water!! 

We couldn't resist the Krispy Kreme in the shape of a snowman!!

Today is our last day in Dubai.  We plan to enjoy the beach and the pool and just relax!  Early tomorrow morning we will be on a 12.5 hr flight from Dubai to New York then on to Columbus.  It has been an amazing trip! 

Harar and Dire Dawa

Here are a few pictures of our trip to Harar and Dire Dawa (pronounced Drey Dow).  It was a beautiful and paved road on the drive to Harar.  The countryside was gorgeous, but very dry.  There is a severe drought in the Harar region.  We passed by a couple large damp grasslands which our guide told us were lakes not long ago.  We saw several small villages and many people walking along the road...many using donkeys or camels to haul materials.  Many of the streets in Harar are very narrow and are just traveled on by foot. 

Here is our awesome travel coordinator/translator Job, who joined us on our trip.  He was a wonderful guide and was incredible with Will. 

Saturday morning we took a small tour of Dire Dawa before heading back to the airport.  We walked through a large market...here is a picture an adorable little girl at the market. 

Will has been very funny about cats on the trip. He tells us several times each day that he misses his kitty Tod.  Will got excited every time we saw a cat in Ethiopia.  He would call them Tod and follow them around.  Unfortunately cats are not nearly as healthy and cared for as in the States so we had to try to keep some distance between them.  Here is one such Tod sitting in a hole in the wall.

Our flight on Ethiopian air was good but pretty warm!  It was just about an hour back to Addis.  Christmas music was playing at the end of the flight.  It was funny to be sitting on a hot plane in Africa listening to 'Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow' and Mariah Carey's 'All I want for Christmas is You'!  We went straight from the airport to see Nathan.  We sadly had to say good-bye to him for the trip.  We knew this would be tough, but it was a lot tougher than we thought it would be.  We are praying the paperwork is taken care of quickly and the US embassy will clear his visa very soon!  We are really hoping Alison can return in late January to bring him home!  We then quickly packed up the rest of our things at the guest house and headed back to the airport for our flight to Dubai.  Here are a few pictures of our final visit with Nathan before we left Ethiopia.

 
Thanks again for all your support and prayers for our journey to our son!!  The main focus of our prayer right now is getting home safely and that Nathan's paperwork will be completed and submitted to the Embassy soon.  This usually takes 2-5 weeks.  We are hoping/praying we will be on the shorter end of that time frame.  Once submitted, the embassy has 10 business days to either clear us, request more information or for difficult cases...the case is referred on to Nairobi.  So we still have a couple more phases of waiting left to do but we know that all will be done in God's perfect timing.  Nathan was also very wheezy and on antibiotics once again while we were there.  He has been sick almost the entire time we have known about him so we ask you to pray for his health and safety until we can bring him home! 

Last Night in Ethiopia

It is hard to believe but it is already our last night in Ethiopia.  We made it to Dire Dawa by a little after 9am this morning, made a quick stop at the hotel to drop our stuff off, then off on about an hour drive to Harar where Nathan was born.  It is really nice to see this part of Ethiopia as it is very different than Addis.  Even though Dire Dawa is the second largest city in Ethiopia it is far different than Addis.  The drive to Harar was through the mountains and several small villages.  Harar is a very old town and we spent some time walking around there.  It is much warmer here and very dry.  The internet at this hotel is pretty slow so no picture update tonight. 

We leave here around 11am tomorrow to fly back to Addis... it is only an hour flight.  Once in Addis we hope to stop by the Transition Home to say goodbye to Nathan, then stop at our hotel there to grab the rest of our luggage, then back to the airport to fly to Dubai.  We leave Ethiopia about 7:30 tomorrow night.  It's a 4 hour flight to Dubai but we lose an hour due to a time zone change, so we'll get into Dubai about 12:30am Sun morning which would be 3:30pm Saturday in Ohio.  Will has been amazingly good for a 2.5 year old boy and makes friends with everyone we meet.  We are just happy that he has been healthy!!  Not really sure what his little puking episode was yesterday morning, but we're thinking he must have just choked on something as he was fine before and since.  Hopefully his health will continue. 

Thanks for all your thoughts and prayers!  We love getting emails too!

Our last full day in Addis

Another great day!  First thing this morning Will got sick which had us pretty worried...but luckily he acted like nothing happened after that and did great on our long, adventurous day.  We were picked up early this morning by our Compassion guide and drove to the other side of Addis to visit a Child Survival Program run by Compassion.  This program has 35 mothers and their young children/babies.  It was awesome to see the work they are doing.  One of the things that the program provides is skill training for the mothers.  In the first picture, a few mothers are skill training.  Will enjoyed playing with the little ones.  Also on the compound is a kindergarten.  The children sang Jesus Loves Me and Old MacDonald to us and then we played with them a little and even blew some bubbles for them. 

Will loved hanging out with our guide the last two days, Fekadu

After our visit to the CSP we had a couple hours to spare so we had the driver drop us off at the transition house to see Nathan as this may have been our last chance to see him before we leave.  We are hoping to be able to see Nathan again on Saturday before we leave Ethiopia, but it all depends on our flights being on time.

How would you like to do all this laundry??

Our final stop for the day was to meet our sponsored child Erimyas.  He is 8 and lives with both parents and a little brother. They kindly invited into their little home for a coffee ceremony.  What an incredibly sweet family!  They had our family photo framed and on top of the TV set!!

This will be our last night in Addis.  At 5:30 tomorrow morning we are going to fly to Dire Dawa and then drive to Harar in hopes of meeting Nathan's birth family and the orphanage he lived in.  We are not sure if we will have internet access there...so we may not post again until Saturday afternoon before we head to Dubai.

We got to meet two of our Compassion kids!!

This is Hiwot.  She is 10 and lives with her mother and two siblings in Addis.  We were able to visit her Compassion project and her home where we also met her mother.  All of the staff was wonderful!  They even had bread, popcorn, coffee, Cokes, and roasted barley and peanuts for us.  Hiwot greeted us with flowers!!  Charlie and Will got to break the bread!!  We had an awesome visit with them.  At Hiwot's house she showed us letters and pictures we had sent her over the last couple of years!  Compassion currently has 82,000 kids in their sponsorship program in Ethiopia!  The project we visited today was one of over 100 in Addis alone...the need is huge!  The program director said that about one sponsor a year comes for a visit to one of the children in his project.  We are so happy to finally visit a Compassion project!!

We also got to meet Setena today!  She is 13 and lives with her grandmother, two siblings and two uncles .  She traveled with one of her uncles and a project worker more than 11 hours on a bus to visit with us.  It was both her and her uncle's first time in Addis.  She came to the guest house where we are staying and visited with us there.  She blew some bubbles for Will.  We have been sponsoring Setena for about 4 years!  She is an incredibly sweet, beautiful girl!!

Tomorrow we are spending another day with Compassion as we have one more child to visit and we are going to visit a Child Survival Program we support as well!

We were able to spend a little bit of time with Nathan to finish off our day!  Here he is making a funny face.  The picture of Will is by the sign for our agency, America World...we look forward to seeing this everyday when he head out to see our children!!

After Court

Here are a few pictures that we took with Nathan after court.  Today we are meeting with a couple of the Compassion kids we sponsor and will hopefully be done with that in time to see Nathan a little bit.