Resulting from an anticipated slowing of children referred for placement, AAI has decided to only accept new families to the Ethiopia program who are wishing to adopt currently waiting children.

As new children are referred for placement, we will first attempt to match the child with one of our waiting families. Then the children will be added to our Waiting Children list on our website. Now more than ever, the children we are being referred for placement are primarily boys, and primarily children who have moderate to severe special needs or are HIV+. Families currently waiting for healthy young girls should expect to have greatly extended wait times.

If you are a currently waiting Ethiopia family and would like to discuss switching to a new country instead of continuing to wait on our Ethiopia list, please contact the AAI office so that we can discuss those options with you.

It is our understanding that a committee is being formed in Ethiopia to carefully consider all available alternatives for children before approving them for international adoption. Most likely this will focus on what happens before children are approved for adoption at their regional court. We would expect this to mean that the process required for a child to be made eligible for adoption will become more stringent and time-consuming, and that referrals will come more slowly. Although we empathize with waiting parents feeling as though they might wait forever, we also support and applaud the efforts of the Ethiopian government to do all things within their power to ensure that each child placed for adoption really, truly needs to be adopted as all other available options have been fully explored.

Before I leave AAI, my one last task will be to plead for each of you to please complete timely, current post placement reports for each of your children. Rarely does more than a day or two pass without requests from our AAI social workers in Ethiopia requesting specific post placement reports which are being requested by either MOWA or a child's relative. With about 2,000 children now adopted from Ethiopia through AAI, this is an incredible number of reports to track and hunt down. These reports are so important, especially now as the government considers the impact of international adoption on each of its adopted children. Please write and submit authentic, accurate reports of how each of your children are doing. If you haven't yet completed your report for 2013, now is the perfect time to do so.

Thank you so much for your help with this vitally important task. The easiest way to complete a post placement report is to go to our website and click on the green Post Placement Reports button. You can even upload digital images of your children here, too. For any questions about post placement reports, please contact Johanna. Thank you so much for helping with this important work!