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?

USCIS received!

It's not anything fully accomplished... but we received a receipt for our I-600A form from US Customs and Immigration Services. So it was received before the fee change date and our forms have been filed. We have 1 year to submit our Home Study but I am hoping it will only be a couple of weeks. We are still waiting to receive the final copy of our Home Study. Then we can take it with us on a Wednesday for a walk-in fingerprinting appointment to the USCIS office in Yakima. (Sounds like a fun trip, huh?!)

Getting closer.

What would you like me to bring you from Africa?

This post isn't related to our adoption process; but our family adoption process. In case you haven't seen our two children recently or they didn't make clear how excited they are about our new baby, here's a funny story for you.

My good friend, Becky, is going on a three week mission trip to Rwanda and leaves in about a week. We spent the day together at the zoo recently and Ocean pointed out Africa on a map in the African Savanna exhibit. He announced that our baby is in Ethiopia which is in Africa. (He's quite smart). Becky showed him Rwanda, where she is going and ask him if he would like her to bring back a present for him from Africa. He jumped up and down and said "Yes! Yes!" She ask him what he thought he would like for her to bring back for him and he (still jumping up and down) answered "My baby!"

UGH!

Well, I was preparing to send our Dossier in to AGCI (All God's Children, International) to be checked over and then sent on to DC for US authentication and then off to Ethiopia for translation.....

Then I discovered that there are some papers that need to be fixed. Both of the notaries that signed off with our doctors on Caleb and my medical forms have commissions that expire soon, as well as the one at Caleb's work that stamped on his proof of employment document. And we can't have any of our documents expiring before our adoption is complete. So now I have to go back to both of our doctors offices, probably with my own notary and have the papers signed again. To make matters worse, just yesterday (prior to realization of the notary expiration fiasco) I took Caleb's medical form back to his doctor along with a new copy to be redone because the doctor had used white out on a mistake! Now I have to go back and bug them yet again! I'm not looking forward to it!

USCIS I-600A form sent in for approval

Today I just sent in our I-600A Application for Advance Processing of Orphan Petition to US Customs and Immigartion Services (USCIS) in Yakima. I believe I wrote about this a little in a previous post titled "update". In that post I stated that I needed to send in a completed copy of our home study document. Which is true that document is needed in order to approve us for international adoption however I do not have that quite yet. Apparently in Washington State you can send in your I-600A form prior to home study completion and submit the home study when it is completed. We will actually travel to Yakima when we have our completed home study and get a walk-in fingerprinting appointment. We choose this way to get our USCIS approval (rather than waiting the week or two and sending our home study along with the form) because we just found out that the I-600A form fees are increasing July 30th!

So I hurried up and sent in our stuff before July runs out so we can still fall in the old (cheaper!) fee schedule!