Last night (the middle of the day in Africa) I received a note from the United States embassy in Addis Ababa giving us approval to travel and pick up our daughter. Hooray! I was hoping very, very much that this would happen before the end of the year. It did on the last possible day. We’ll be buying plane tickets now for the middle of January. This time, only my wife will go to pick her up while I watch the other three.
We’ve been learning Amharic together using flashcards made on her iPod with the most useful words we could find from a travel phrasebook and a larger dictionary. We are up to 340 that we know now! It’s been a lot of fun – whether it ends up being that helpful for talking to our daughter or not.