Delay?

Some of you may have already seen the news stories about civil unrest in Addas Ababa over the last few days. I’ll try to give a brief overview of the situation and let you know how this may affect our plans.

Ethiopia held elections on May 15 to determine the country’s ruling party. The current Prime Minister, Meles Zanawi, has been in office since 1991 and this year’s election has been hotly contested by the opposition. This election was intended to be the most fair and open election to date in Ethiopia and was overseen by observers from the European Union, the US based Carter Center, and the African Union. Provisional election results have shown that the ruling party has won a majority of the vote and will maintain control of the country but the opposition claims that the vote was unfair due to voting irregularity, fraud and intimidation by the ruling party. These claims are being investigated and the announcement of the official results has been pushed back to July 8 so investigators can research the claims.

For the last few days, students have been violating the ban on protests and demonstrations put in place by Zanawi. Today, the protests became more violent and at least 26 people have been killed after police fired on the crowd. At least 100 more people were injured and hospitalized. You can read more about the situation by clicking on the links below.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/africa/06/08/ethiopia.deaths/index.html

This link provides additional background on the election.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4541231.stm

We do not yet know for sure how this will affect our travel plans. As of tonight, the US State Department has not issued any travel warnings or advisories for Ethiopia related to this violence. However, our adoption agency sent an e-mail today saying that they are not going to allow any families or staff to travel for the time being. We don’t know yet if this means our June 22 travel date is officially cancelled or if events over the next several days may still allow us to travel as we had planned. This is very disappointing for us but these events are certainly out of our control. We do know that the babies at the care center are safe and business continues there as usual. We’ll keep you posted as we learn more.

Thanks,
Grant