My peace and calm lasted for a few weeks leading up to our trip to Haiti last month.
Where we met Baby Brother, aka "Mr. Dimple."
Zen quickly replaced by urgency and rising panic as the social welfare agency in charge of adoption in Haiti decided to stop accepting adoption dossiers for a period of time. The period of time is not extremely long, but I think any of us who have been through an adoption are well aware of the meaning of delays, temporary "holds", and increasing restrictions.
Not knowing exactly what is going to happen in Haiti, we have spent the last couple of weeks attempting to finish the dossier that we began in February. (For those not in the know, a homestudy and dossier normally take about 3-4 months to complete because many pieces of it are not under our control.)
Every. single. problem that one could encounter with an adoption homestudy and dossier...we have encountered. It has been an agonizing process.
Some of the problems we've experienced: FBI backlog for our fingerprint clearance required to finish our homestudy, lost application for J's birth certificate from California (actually still waiting for this to be resolved 5+ weeks later), two notaries who misspelled their own names which caused those documents to be rejected for authentication, rejected Washington DC child abuse clearance - technical glitch (fortunately resolved that by using the clearance from our last adoption), employment letter for Jeremy had to be rewritten FOUR times by his HR department and then they forgot to notarize the final copy (and then they notarized it incorrectly and it had to be done AGAIN!!), French translator fell through and we had to pay $200 more than going rate to get expedited translations, my doctor stopped doing TB skin tests so I had to go downtown to the health department to get one implanted and then back again to get it read and then hand deliver results to my doctor, entire dossier missent by the post office when it was supposed to be going to CO Secretary of State (creating a statewide "manhunt" for the express mail envelope it was in) = four day delay for something that should have been one day turn around. Oh, there is more, but those are the immediate issues that come to mind. There have been moments when all we could do was laugh. But truthfully the amount of money we've had to spend fixing errors that were not our fault and overnighting documents is horrifying and hasn't even been totaled yet.
Finally, after overnighting the completed dossier to the consulate in Chicago last week for legalization, the consulate took some days off and didn't legalize the dossier at all. (Supposed to be one day turn around.) We are still waiting for the package to arrive back to us. Today is our cutoff. Last day it can possibly arrive and still make it to Haiti in time.
If the dossier arrives today then we have a few hours to put it together with translations, make three photo copies of every page (with translations, medical lab reports, 3 years of tax returns, authentications and legalizations that's probably going to be 100 pages in the original copy.) Then it will fly Fed Ex next day air to arrive at the home of a family traveling on Saturday morning. Allowing ONE day (Monday) to sneak this thing in under the May 1st cutoff.
I don't know. I have been praying a lot. J has helped each time I've come to the end of my rope.
We want to share more. We want to show you a photo of Mr. Dimple and tell you all about him. All about how we chose to adopt from Haiti and our trip there last month. But I need this dossier to safely make it into the adoption system first.
So please pray with me that it will happen. We would really like to call ourselves a family of four.
~A
Where we met Baby Brother, aka "Mr. Dimple."
Zen quickly replaced by urgency and rising panic as the social welfare agency in charge of adoption in Haiti decided to stop accepting adoption dossiers for a period of time. The period of time is not extremely long, but I think any of us who have been through an adoption are well aware of the meaning of delays, temporary "holds", and increasing restrictions.
Not knowing exactly what is going to happen in Haiti, we have spent the last couple of weeks attempting to finish the dossier that we began in February. (For those not in the know, a homestudy and dossier normally take about 3-4 months to complete because many pieces of it are not under our control.)
Every. single. problem that one could encounter with an adoption homestudy and dossier...we have encountered. It has been an agonizing process.
Some of the problems we've experienced: FBI backlog for our fingerprint clearance required to finish our homestudy, lost application for J's birth certificate from California (actually still waiting for this to be resolved 5+ weeks later), two notaries who misspelled their own names which caused those documents to be rejected for authentication, rejected Washington DC child abuse clearance - technical glitch (fortunately resolved that by using the clearance from our last adoption), employment letter for Jeremy had to be rewritten FOUR times by his HR department and then they forgot to notarize the final copy (and then they notarized it incorrectly and it had to be done AGAIN!!), French translator fell through and we had to pay $200 more than going rate to get expedited translations, my doctor stopped doing TB skin tests so I had to go downtown to the health department to get one implanted and then back again to get it read and then hand deliver results to my doctor, entire dossier missent by the post office when it was supposed to be going to CO Secretary of State (creating a statewide "manhunt" for the express mail envelope it was in) = four day delay for something that should have been one day turn around. Oh, there is more, but those are the immediate issues that come to mind. There have been moments when all we could do was laugh. But truthfully the amount of money we've had to spend fixing errors that were not our fault and overnighting documents is horrifying and hasn't even been totaled yet.
Finally, after overnighting the completed dossier to the consulate in Chicago last week for legalization, the consulate took some days off and didn't legalize the dossier at all. (Supposed to be one day turn around.) We are still waiting for the package to arrive back to us. Today is our cutoff. Last day it can possibly arrive and still make it to Haiti in time.
If the dossier arrives today then we have a few hours to put it together with translations, make three photo copies of every page (with translations, medical lab reports, 3 years of tax returns, authentications and legalizations that's probably going to be 100 pages in the original copy.) Then it will fly Fed Ex next day air to arrive at the home of a family traveling on Saturday morning. Allowing ONE day (Monday) to sneak this thing in under the May 1st cutoff.
I don't know. I have been praying a lot. J has helped each time I've come to the end of my rope.
We want to share more. We want to show you a photo of Mr. Dimple and tell you all about him. All about how we chose to adopt from Haiti and our trip there last month. But I need this dossier to safely make it into the adoption system first.
So please pray with me that it will happen. We would really like to call ourselves a family of four.
~A
