Yekemeum Shai: Ethiopian Soap

While we wait the remaining months for our new baby we are taking the time to learn about Ethiopian culture and some basics of the Amharic language. We would like to share some of this with you through a fundraiser we are conducting to off set our adoption costs.

If you know us well, you know that we make soap. You have probably received soap from us as a gift or possibly have purchased soap from us. We decided to make a special Ethiopian soap as our fundraiser. We crafted this soap after Ethiopian spiced tea, Yekemeum Shai. Yekemeum Shai is a black tea with cardamom, cinnamon, and clove spices in it. Yekemeum Shai literally means “spiced tea.” Our Yekemeum Shai soap contains Palm, Coconut, and Caster oils for a smooth moisturizing lather; and essential oils from black tea, cardamom, cinnamon, and clove as well as ground dried cardamom for an amazing fragrance resembling the drink.

If you would like to support us through the purchase of Yekemeum Shai soap, we have priced it at $5 a bar. Even if you are not interested in our Ethiopian soap we encourage you to consider some of our other soaps. All sales help us fund our adoption. All of our other soaps are priced at $4 a bar or $12 for 4 bars.

Current soaps available:
Apple-Cinnamon
Cucumber-Melon
Lavender
Mango
Nag Champa
Strawberry
Unscented
Vanilla
Yekemeum Shai: Ethiopian

You can place an order by blog post, phone, mail or email!

Thank you for your continued support of our growing family!

God Bless you,
Caleb & Jen Oglesby

Dossier Complete and en route.

Wonderful news this week! We got our Dossier totally completed! I had found one more error that I had to take care of. We redid the one page I found an error on and got photocopies made and put the whole packet together and sent it to AGCI on Wednesday. Thursday we got a call that it was received and today I got the call that it was reviewed and looks awesome and is being sent in for Authentication! Nothing else was found to need correcting. Whew!

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Finally all of our end is complete and we just have to wait. and wait. and wait!

A step forward!

Our Home Study finally got through all the hoops and arrived in our mailbox! We took it this past Wednesday to Yakima to submit to join our waiting I-600A form. We also got our fingers printed on these cool machines that looked right out of the CSI tv show! Our fingers were scanned by a machine and showed up on a computer screen and the computer would tell the technician if the prints were good or if they needed to print them again. They didn't even ink our fingers, so we didn't get dirty!

Now we are waiting for our USCIS approval letter (also known as Favorable Determination Letter or FDL) before we will be placed on the waiting list for a child. This should take 6-8 weeks.

We are also now (since we are waiting for the FDL) able to send in our completed Dossier to our adoption agency for review. Then it will be sent on to Washington DC for US Authentication and on to Ethiopia for translation. Unfortunately, while making the 4 complete photocopies of the Dossier I need to send in I discovered an error in another one of our papers and am working to get that redone this week.

In Ethiopia the courts are still closed until the 1st of October for their millennium celebration. Hopefully when they reopen everything runs smoothly. Y2K was a scare for us, I wonder if it is for them?