When will we travel to bring the kids home?

We get asked this question a lot!  The answer we give is, "Hopefully some time this winter."  The courts in Ethiopia have been closed for the rainy season and then training.  They open again on October 12.  Our dossier arrived in Ethiopia on September 14 and is already through translation.  That means that it is sitting on someone's desk (probably our agency's lawyer) waiting to be submitted to the courts.  We've been told that it usually takes about two weeks after submission to get a court date assigned.  The question is, once they assign a date, how far into the future will it be?  The courts have been closed for almost two months.  That means that haven't heard any cases for two months.  That means there are two months of dossiers waiting to get a court date.  Will they go top to bottom, first in first out, or totally random when they assign dates?  Will our date be a week after getting it assigned, a month, two months, more?  Noone has a clue!  Sometimes, even after the case is heard, a family "fails".  This can happen for a whole bunch of different reasons: power outage, missing document, the judge is sick, and many other things.  A new date would then be assigned until the case passes.  Once we pass court, we should be able to pick up the kids and bring them home about a month later. 

The short answer, December at the earliest and hopefully no later than February.