If you only know us through this blog, then you probably haven’t heard our disappointing news.  Last week we were informed that the US Embassy in Ethiopia had canceled half of our agency’s standing appointments with them for the month of July.  Because of this, we were bumped from our spots.

I do not understand exactly why this happened, or why our agency was uninformed of this change until so late in the game.  Holt was not the only agency to be surprised by this announcement, so there was obviously some kind of terrible miscommunication between the embassy and adoption agencies.

We, of course, had already bought our plane tickets as we were planning on being in Ethiopia for our July 27th appointment with the embassy.  When we talked with our travel agent, she told us it would be close to $4,000 to change our tickets to early August.  Obviously, this was not part of our adoption budget.

We then began, with the support of our agency, to petition the embassy to give us an individual appointment so that we could travel during our original travel dates.  We have a friend that was successful in getting an individual appointment.  The embassy basically ignored us for three days, and then sent us an uninformative form e-mail 10 minutes before closing time on Friday.  They are not my favorite people now, to say the least.

After it became clear that we would be fighting with them into the next week, we decided to call our airline directly and see what they could do for us.  Imagine our shock when Casey asked them how much it would cost to change our tickets to our new travel dates and they said, “$200 each.”  Our response was, “Book it!”

We are definitely disappointed that we are delayed in traveling to bring Evelyn home.  We will now be leaving for Ethiopia on August 4.  But we know that God is in control of this.  There must be some reason that this is His plan.  We know that He was answering our prayers by allowing us to get our tickets changed for such a low price.

This week has been hard, as we are looking at 3 more weeks of waiting before we can leave, but we are trying to put our trust in Him.

In other, better news, we found out last Friday that we have been granted an adoption grant through Show Hope!  This is an incredible blessing that we were not expecting.  The grant is large enough to cover all of our post-placement and re-adoption expenses when we get Evelyn home.  Praise God!

Thank you for your continued prayers for our little girl and for our big trip coming up.