A post from Ben....
It’s hard to describe this last week that Tracy and I have had, apart from the term “bad space”. It’s been a hard week for us, especially considering we had hoped that this would be a week of celebration, and perhaps even travel plans. But tonight, as we view the long, 3-day weekend ahead of us, the mood is “down”.
As those who follow us know, last Thursday (or by some counts, Friday) was the last day of our mandatory 10 day wait to have our oldest daughter’s birth certificate corrected. We had our hopes up (something I don’t advise people to do) that everyone would be motivated to get the birth certificate corrected, translated, and off to the US Embassy. But, it seems that’s not the case.
On Monday, the director of the orphanage, who’s signature was required to get the birth certificate fixed, thought it higher priority to take a bunch of the girls for a day-long picnic than to go sign the document that’s key to the adoption of two of them. A promise of “do it tomorrow” didn’t work out, as on Tuesday she was called into a meeting which prevented her from going. On Wednesday, she was finally able to go and sign it, but instead of her signature resulting in something tangible as we had believed, it simply resulted in a promise that the all-important-document would be done in a few days. The week was extremely frustrating; day-in-day-out waiting for some good news. Frustrated that our agency in the US is reactive in nature, instead of proactive as we had anticipated they would be, and we have been especially frustrated that even the people on the ground, closest to the girls, can be so lackadaisical in the way they work towards a resolution. It hasn’t been an easy chapter for us, as we sit and wait.
At the end of the day Friday, our agency wrote to us and told us that the most recent update is that perhaps a new birth certificate will be issued on Monday or Tuesday. Sure, it’s good news- technically, but we’re not getting our hopes up. They warned us the other day to be prepared for the “great possibility” of more delays, which isn’t what we need to hear right now. This last part of the process has been as unbearable as a sunburn that begins to itch so bad that it drives you to insanity. We just don’t know how many more phone calls we can bear that start of with “hey guys… we have more bad news…” Something’s gotta give, as they say.
But, as a former president used to say, we are “cautiously optimistic” if for no other reason than we can’t quite think of any more areas that could go wrong. If all goes as plan, a new birth certificate will be issued at the beginning of the week and will be sent to Lima for translation, certification from the Peruvian government (that the change was done legally), and then submission to the US Embassy. We have no idea how long of a process that might be—realistically, it should only take a few days at most, but nothing ever seems to go as planned. So, here’s how you can pray for us:
- Please pray that we’ll start to feel encouraged, and find our strength again. We just feel so zapped by this last month.
- Pray that we’ll remember that it’s ultimately God’s job to get all this done. We’ve lost confidence in most of the people actually involved, and need to remember that we need to put our confidence in Him.
- Pray that the Civil Registrar will actually do this on Monday and not delay in producing the new birth certificate
- Pray that the new certificate would quickly arrive in Lima, and that the translation and certification process would be quick and without error.
- Finally, please pray that the US Embassy would accept the new packet when turned in and that we would receive the “Article 5”, on the spot. We had been told by our agency that the article 5 process could take a week, but from talking with many of you these past few weeks we realized that many of the other adoption agencies are receiving their Article 5 letters on the spot, the same day simply because they ask for it the same day, and wait for it to be issued so that it can be hand-walked to the SNA (the last step of the process). So, we KNOW that all of this can be done in one day, but need people to pray that it will be the case for us.
