James 1:27
Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.
Proverbs 25:25
Like cold water to a weary soul is good news from a distant land.

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

MOWA defined

This was posted on our adoption agency's yahoo group by one of the other adoptive families. Their question about MOWA's role in the adoption process is answered by one of the agency's family coordinators and I found it to be pretty insightful.

Here is our question (just to give you an idea of where she is coming
> from in her answer)
: It is my understanding that MOWA basically
> approves us (the family) for adoption. Not that they actually do any
> research on potential orphans. If this is indeed the case, isn't it
> possible that we are past the point of MOWA approval as we have been DTE
> for over 6 months now?
> Here is her answer: "Thank you for your question. MOWA is the central
> authority on all children's issues. On paper, they are the
> approving party for both dossier and children's documents (whether a
> child should get a passport, birth certificate, adoption, visa, etc).
> Thus, they are the authority on anything relating to a child in
> Ethiopia. Regarding MOWA and the recommendation letters: These letters
> are not sent to court until the actual day of a family's court case.
> However, these letters are a necessity for a family to pass court. If
> MOWA does decide to significantly decrease the amount of recommendation
> letters signed and sent per day, this means more families will not be
> passing court on the first attempt (which could slow down the overall
> process). Currently, about 60% of families pass court on the first
> date.
> To answer your question, this letter is not sent until the day of court
> and "not sending" the letter does not necessarily mean your
> family is rejected. It may mean your family's case needs to be
> re-submitted to court until they do submit one. Before this change,
> MOWA neglected to send recommendation letters for families often, which
> resulted in families not passing court multiple times.
> We are unsure how long this decrease will be in place, in addition to
> how significant of an impact it will have (depending on the amount of
> cases they actually decrease per day). We do know that the judges and
> the Ethiopian courts are major advocates for adoption and are presently
> pushing MOWA to continue to process many cases per day.
> Right now families will still travel for court dates, but may not pass
> if MOWA does not send a recommendation letter. The family would then
> give their consent to adopt the child at court, and our Power of
> Attorney would go to court for the family on the subsequent dates.
> This all being said, we are unaware of timelines at this point. We will
> need to watch and see the effect over coming weeks/months in order to
> see if it will impinge on timelines. At present, meetings are taking
> place between MOWA and the Ethiopian courts. Once we have confirmed
> information, we will relay this to families."

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