Mis-understanding

The packet we were waiting for finally arrived last week, and today we were able to have a conference call with our Case Manager. She walked us through the next few steps of our adoption process. The bad news is that we found out we're not actually on "the list" yet as I thought I had understood. We were simply accepted into the Ethiopia Program on May 21st. Now we are waiting on our Immigration Approval from USCIS (form I171H). But before we can receive our Immigration approval, the USCIS has to capture our biometrics (ie fingerprints), which we have to do on a specific date, at a specific time and location which they completely control. That's OK though. We just received the notification of our appointments with the USCIS in the mail! So we will go to Portland on June 23 to be fingerprinted. Once this is done we'll wait for our final immigration approval letter which should arrive in the next 5-6 weeks we're guessing. Once that arrives, THEN we will be added to the list for a referral.

We tried to get a more specific estimated timeframe from our Case Manager today regarding how long it will take to receive a referral, but she was still pretty vague -except for saying that she's very sure we would receive a match within 10 months of being on the list. She did tell us that we need to expect the possibility of receiving a referral much quicker than that as well, as that could happen too -which was very encouraging. She wouldn't tell us how many families were ahead of us, as she said it could change between now and when we receive our Immigration approval anyway. She agreed she will share more details once we receive our Immigration approval.