News about Chera and Kenenisa!

Last night at our Family Fellowship we received some wonderful news about the boys. Their files are complete and the orphanage can file for a court date once the courts open up! In country, the director of the orphanage told us his goal was to be able to file them once the court opened back up and he was true to his word. Even though Ganano told us this, we did not really expect it to happen. After learning more about their case and about how things work in Ethiopia, I understand how hard it was to get this done. We are very thankful for all their hard work.
The next step will be for the orphanage to file for a court date. This can't happen until courts open back up. I think this will happen in a couple weeks. Once they are filed, we will get in line to be assigned a court date. Before court closed they were assigning court dates for October/November. There will be a lot of cases filed at the same time so we expect that it could take a few months to receive a court date.
I don't know if I have blogged about this, but we do know for sure that we will have to go twice for the boys. Even though we have seen them, the Ethiopian Government wants us to to attend their court date. They are also wanting both parents to attend. We were planning on only one of us to go to the court date. One change that we found out about last night is that the time between passing court and when you go get the kids can be quite a bit longer now. The US embassy in now investigating each individual case, but this cannot happen until after the kids have passed court. The investigation can take between 15 day to 8 weeks ( on top of the 4-6 weeks we have to wait after they pass court). We understand and are fine with all of this. We have grown used to the constant changes that happen when you are adopting! The boys are safe, healthy, happy, and loved right now, so that is all we need.
One really neat thing that we just figured out. Zoey, Chera, and Kenenisa all had/have the same name last name in Ethiopia! Zoey and the boys are from different ethnic groups, that have different languages, so the spelling is slightly different and we in no way think they are biologically related. Chera and Kenenisa's last name is Berhanu, which means "light." Zoey's last name was Birhane, which means "my light." Pretty amazing connection there.

Thanks for all your prayers and encouragement!