What's a referral anyway?

Okay, so I wanted to explain what the referral process is and attempt to explain why we’re waiting so long to get our child. A lot of people seem to think getting a referral means we get our child, but that's not how it works, so just wanted to clarify.
When we receive our referral it means that we find out, for the very first time, who our child is: boy or girl, age, a photo, and as much health and family history that is available on that particular child. Right now we have no idea if our child has been born or not or who the parents are; international adoption (IA) is very different from domestic adoption that way. So when we get our referral we have 2 weeks to consider it, show the profile to a pediatrician who specializes in IA, and then accept or decline the referral. Of course we pray there’d be no reason to decline the referral after waiting so long, but you never know. If we accept the referral, it’s still several months before actually getting our child. A court date is scheduled in Ethiopia and it’s quite common that the case does not pass on the first go around, not because it’s not a legitimate case, but because there was a missing piece of paper (try and imagine a court system in a 3rd world country – things move very slowly and inefficiently from an American’s perspective). So then another date is set and more waiting ensues. When the child passes court, then we can buy our plane tix and plan to travel usually 1 month later. In sum, the time between referral and travel is about 4 – 8 months.
A couple of posts ago I said we expect to get a referral in December of 2009 and pick up our child in March 2010. Well, the wait time with our agency has increased since we submitted our dossier last December and it’s now 12 to 18 months. This of course was devastating news for us – we’ve been trying to have a family since 2003 for crying out loud! Sometimes I honestly wonder if it’s ever going to happen and if there’s some reason God doesn’t want us to be parents (that’s on a bad day). On better days, I surrender to the process and have faith that it will all happen when it’s meant to and that once we have our baby in our arms, none of the work and waiting will matter.
It’s really hard to explain the long wait time when we all know how many millions of children there are in need of parents and homes. It just seems so unfair to have the children waiting in orphanages when we and so many other parents-to-be would love to have them here with us! Basically, the increased bureaucracy is to protect the children and ensure that they have actually been relinquished, not kidnapped and sold. The other factors that increase wait time are that there are fewer countries open for IA at the moment and there are more people interested in adopting internationally than ever before.
The jist of it: we could receive a referral anytime between January and June of 2010 and have our child 4 -5 months after that. As you can see, the windows are broad. IA is definitely not a predictable, orderly process, so it’s requiring an immense amount of patience.