A letter to our friends and family

Dear friends and family,


After such a long journey to bring Allison home, we have hit a bump during the final week that has left us spinning.

A short recap:

• August 2009: We started our adoption process
• May 6, 2010: We were matched with our beautiful daughter. We saw her picture and knew her name for the first time.
• July 30th-August 8th: We traveled to Ethiopia to meet Allison and to appear in Ethiopia court to finalize our adoption. On August 5th, Allison legally became our daughter! (When we first started the Ethiopian adoption process, we were not required to physically attend court, but the laws changed during our process. Although our trip was amazing, it added extra costs that we had not prepared for.)
• August: Found out that our US Embassy date was September 30th. We booked tickets with Delta for September 24th – October 3rd.
• September 16th: Got a call from our agency that something was wrong and the US Embassy changed our date from September 30th to October 14th. We were in shock as everything was set for travel: Tony’s time off, childcare for our older daughters, travel plans. But, we quickly did what we had to do and changed our flights for the new dates, including paying hundreds of dollars in change fees.
• September 17th: Found out that the mistake that was made in changing our appointment might be able to be fixed, moving our Embassy date back to September 30th. We are traveling with 6 other families. Only we and one other family had changed their tickets. The other five are now waiting to see what happens.

What happens now:

• On Monday, our lawyer in Ethiopia will return to the Embassy to see if they will accept our paperwork for an Embassy appointment on September 30th. If that happens, we will have the option to change our flights back to what they were on Thursday morning before we got a call from our agency. But there will be another charge of change fees, plus we will have to pay the difference between what we originally paid when we booked our tickets weeks ago, to the new price of buying two tickets to Ethiopia only four days before we travel.

Please pray:

• That the US Embassy will accept our documents on Monday for our appointment on September 30th.
• Assuming that the Embassy date changes back, pray that we can find someone who works for Delta who can help us change our tickets back without any additional cost.
• Or, that we can find a generous donor(s) who can help us cover these additional costs. Even before these changes happened, we had run out of money in our adoption fund. Now we are running on faith. We have a secure donation link on our blog that uses PayPal.

 

Lastly, please pray, and please forward this to your church, prayer groups, Bible study, and friends and family. When the church works together, things can happen.

Thank you,

Tony, Sara, and the Weber girls