After two years of fear and waiting, American couple arrives from Ethiopia with new daughter

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This morning in Washington DC, somewhere in the middle of an 18 hour plane journey from Ethiopia to Birmingham, a customs official put a stamp on little Hanna Elizabeth Hill’s crisp new passport and said, “Congratulations. You are a United States citizen.”

The 8-month-old was at a loss for words (it had been a long flight, after all), but fortunately her brand new parents Mike and Ashley Hill were doing the talking. They had been waiting two years of applications, paperwork, phone calls, referrals, paperwork and two trips to the center of Africa for the moment when their daughter would be officially, irrevocably theirs.

“People that we’d never met before were just sitting there congratulating us. It was just very special,” said Mike Hill, who managed to pull away from the crowd of around 50 family, friends and members of the Shades Mountain Baptist community.

They greeted the newly-expanded family with balloons and American flags and spent the first moments in the airport trying to squeeze in closer to the girl they had all been reading and praying about since the couple decided to adopt two years ago. Mike’s mother Bobbie Hill had waited three sons and two grandsons for a little girl, and it was the first time she could really let herself get excited.

“I was afraid to hope. I wanted a child for them so bad, but it’s been so long in the waiting. I was afraid that they would say, ‘You can’t have this child,’” Bobbie said.

Mike and Ashley have chronicled the process of adopting one of Ethiopia’s 4.3 million orphans (according to America World Adoption Agency) in a blog. They said the journey was as uncertain as it was long, and at times the whole thing seemed one lost form or late night email away from falling through completely.

“The waiting has been hard,” said Ashley Hill. “We were hoping that we would find out who she was by Christmas, but we didn’t. It was a very hard time for me.”

The couple had already traveled to Ethiopia in June to meet Hanna. Eight-year-old Hudson, the oldest of Hanna’s two brothers, got to come along.

“My eyes went up, they were up,” Hudson said, spreading eyelids with his fingers. “And I was so excited I didn’t know what to say.”

A series of unexpected logistical problems delayed Mike and Ashley’s final trip for ten nervous weeks. “She looks so different!” Hudson said when he saw her again in the airport.

But the Hills are done with embassies, Ethiopian courts and trans-Atlantic flights for the moment. Now all Mike has to worry about is raising his first daughter.

“There will definitely be some questions and some uncertainty about how we tell her story to her, and when she asks those questions. It’s going be a challenge, but I think it’s going be great.”

But first they need shake the jet-lag.

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By Jared Downing | [email protected]