Pondering the Whys....

We woke up this morning to find we needed to move and that we needed to find the new place on our own or call the guide and pay her to help. Thank God Jennifer and Erica (friend from previous post) had not left town.  Jennifer talked to her host and secured a room for us and then they came over to meet Ben and took us to see it and accept the reservation.  They showed us the 3 bakeries within a half a block, the places to eat, the grocery store, etc. It will cost less each night and breakfast is included.  Although to be displaced while in country is unsettling we are in a better situation for now.  What a blessing to have these two wonderful ladies here (who have been here a number of times now) to love on us, care for us, and be the familiar face in a heightened emotional time.  Ladies we appreciate you!

In the same conversation we were told we would not be going to Chincha on Monday maybe Tuesday. We also were told we could call the Embassy ourselves but that our rep was just going to wait to hear. She neglected to tell us the US Embassy is only open a half day on Friday until later when it was the assigned time to call. See when we arrived here late Tuesday night we learned that there had been yet another mistake that required fixing which delayed us another day and then when the letter was ready it was not picked up for translation the same day but the next, another day lost. Now it's the weekend and we will move tomorrow and visit the Embassy first thing Monday morning and see what we can get for answers ourselves.

As we have walked the streets and the park we have encountered young girls with sleeping children begging for money while others are selling things. The babies are often sleeping in slings and although school has started in this region, they are working when they should be in school. Some may not think twice but these girls are more than likely working for others, the money is not their own. My heart cries as I look deep into their eyes and know that contributing is supporting this enslavement and that not giving may also have negative outcomes. It makes me you want to justify giving in the moment and yet our conviction to help end modern day slavery burns deep within. Not far from my thoughts, oh God, thank you for J & J and caring for them even in this waiting, this could be them.

Pondering the whys,  reflecting, asking God for a break and yet brought back to the place to hold on to what I know is good and true and NOT letting these obstacles take away from the fact that we are in country and we are almost with our girls. 

Please continue to pray with us.  We feel the prayers and although we don't understand the BIG picture we will not lose HOPE!  Thank you God for the gift of friends who "just happen to be in Peru" to help us in a time of need.

What I Love About Blogs

We have been in Peru nearly 48 hours and tonight I am feeling a bit more oriented. I have learned a few more things about myself and about the adoption journey. You can not really plan or prepare for how you are going to feel or experience a life event o such magnitude. I never imagined I would be sobbing one minute and giddy the next. I was kind of scaring myself. Ben did a fairly good job with going with the flow but really he just wanted me to NOT break out in crocodile tears one.more.time!

Last night we had a wonderful visit with Jennifer and her friend. Jennifer is another waiting mom and found my blog. It was so fun to hear her tell her story about searching the internet for blogs night after night for a long time until she discovered mine and Paige it is exactly what I did many nights a week for 14 months until I discovered Paige. The desire to connect with others on the adoption journey in the same place has been significant. I was not sure I was going to blog publicly, however when Paige asked me to consider the benefit of one person finding my blog like I found hers I knew I needed to blog publically as another possible connection. I have been so blessed by my blog community. Some family and friends and some strangers that have reached out to leave a comment or offer support in various ways. Spending the evening with Jennifer and the conversation was another confirmation. Our hearts connected because we have a love for the people and the country of Peru and a shared passion for the orphans of Peru.

We have plans to meet up with a Canadian family who are missionaries here and will begin the adoption process in May. We are also planning to meet up with our teacher from our Peruvian cooking class. She is part of an amazing organization of Peruvians who come back yearly to work with a program to help street kids.

So we are learning our neighborhood and where to shop. I already know that Metro is our Market Basket and Vivando is our Shaws. Metro it is. I also know where to shop for clothes and shoes (thank you Brenda) if we need to for the girls and can know get to both places on my own from our apartment.

As for our daughters. We talked to them today and asked them if they wanted to hear about a surprise we had for them. We could hear the excitement in their voices. Si si. We told them we were in Lima waiting for the final paper and would be there any day. They were thrilled. We can hardly stand ourselves. We are happy about being here. It was the best decision for our family. Getting settled and familiar before having our daughters join us having a sense of how we will function when they join us. Also for our own sense of refreshment and rejuvenation after this last part of the journey.

 

This is Really Happening

It was staring me down, and winning. We were on our Delta flight, and the “are we there yet?” screen that shows your location and time to destination, kept blinking back at me- almost teasing me- with images of North America behind me, and South America in front of me. Tail wind speed, miles already traveled… finally it hit me: this is really happening.


I was feeling more and more what I had been feeling in the days prior, only to a much more heightened extent: “so excited I could puke, but in a good way” is the best I know how to describe it.

Tracy was feeling it too, but her reactions were…. well, um, a bit different than mine. I guess it’s the whole from Mars vs. Venus thing. Leaving the house for the airport? Cried. Plane taking off? Cried. Waiting for next flight in Atlanta? Spontaneous laughter. Plane ride? A mix of silliness and more crying. Landing in Lima? Well, you can only imagine. She cried. I sure didn’t know what to do. It was hard for me- I’m your typical guy, and I just want to “fix” things. But this time, there wasn’t much to fix, because things were actually going well. As we landed, I got frustrated and said “you’ve got to stop crying!” Thankfully, Tracy put it all in perspective for me when she realized the exasperated look on my face, and said: “You don’t know how lucky you have it. Just consider this my ‘going into labor’ part of becoming a mother—I could be yelling and cursing you out.” So, I realized that this was just how she was processing the labor pains marking the end of a long, hard, paper pregnancy. As she told me the other day, she’s been “pregnant” longer than an Elephant.

When we arrived in Lima around midnight, things went quite smoothly getting our bags, going through immigration, and finding our in-country representative who brought us to our temporary apartment here in Lima. It’s a very comfortable place to be staying with all the basic amenities that we’ll need. We’re quite happy with it.

The update our agent gave us last night was that the paperwork to finalize the adoption was STILL not done. It wasn’t a shocker for us, but certainly was disappointing. She said that the letter from SNA (letter from Gov of Peru to the US Gov certifying that the birth certificate was changed legally) was finally completed earlier that day, that she’d get it the next (today) and turn it into the US Consulate on Thursday. That was the news we went to bed with.

This morning we met up with our guide, Mary. Mary is a really friendly Lima native who we’ve hired for a few days to show us around town and to help us feel comfortably settled in this community before we get the girls. We had a really nice breakfast with her, and she showed us a bit around the area of Lima where we are living for the next month. We are within a few blocks of the town center, which has beautiful architecture, a nice grocery store, restaurants, parks, and everything else we’ll need in the meantime. However, after just a few hours of walking around we realized that we were still so tired from traveling, that everything was becoming a big blur for us. So, we retired for a Peruvian siesta.

As we get ready to head out for our first dinner here in Peru, we’ve got another update on our paperwork: the certification was picked up, translated this afternoon, and will be delivered to the US consulate in the morning! We praying that it will be immediately accepted and that the consulate will issue our Article 5 tomorrow, so that we can be with the girls immediately. Keep praying!

Seven Hundred Nintey Six Days

796 days ago we sent our application to our adoption agency to bring home our 2 daughters from the Peru Waiting Angels Program.  We were told it would be 12-18 months depending on how long our homestudy and the dossier took to be processed.  Twelve (12) months quickly came and went, but 18 months looked promising.  The possibilities of things that could go wrong DID go wrong. Delay turned into redo turned into error turned into unknown, you get the picture.  We just wanted things remedied, we wanted our daughters home.  We didn’t understand, we couldn’t understand and yet we desperately wanted to understand.  Why? When? What? Where? Who? We learned that agencies are just that, an agency.  They have a role to play, but they are not the ultimate, they are a business, they have images to uphold and bills to pay.  One agencies concern in granting a favorable homestudy to a married couple considered by a non married Social Worker to be minorities, because we chose to adopt and older children, proved not to be our first and final hurdle on this journey.  She believed adoption to be a way to grow your family when traditional means were exhausted or as an afterthought.  So although we shared we had a heart for older children, she would not “approve us” and her reason, we had never parented before.  Silly silly SW, no first time parents have ever parented before.  Although initially we were relieved with an approved homestudy up to the age of eight, our hearts were not settled.  We chose our adoption agency based on the Waiting Angels program. We wanted to become a forever family with a sister sibling group whose statistics were not in their favor.  It became more and more apparent that we needed to pursue our initial desire.  It was then that we found Julissa and Johanna.  We changed homestudy agencies and our lovely Social Worker was thrilled to increase our age.  She had no concerns and expedited our updated homestudy to get our immigration paperwork updated.    The process to officially becoming matched with them and the final immigration process happened in record time. Until the last moment when a typo was discovered.  The time from when we found our daughters, updated our immigration paperwork, requested our daughters, approved by the Peruvian government and made it back through immigration was done in record time.  

In the 12-18 months we were told that it would take to complete our adoption our daughters were waiting for the process to be completed to become Waiting Angels.  It was when we found them and knew they were our daughters that we pursued the age increase.  THESE WERE THE GIRLS that we initially desired to become a forever family with and we knew they were our daughters.  It took us 23 months to be united on paper, and now at 26 months and 1 day we will fly to Peru to hear the day we will united forever as a family. 

Unexpected Blessings

During these past few days, Tracy and I have been showered with encouragement from so many different directions. While the adoption journey can be a lonely one- and our process has felt like that on so many levels- today, we feel loved, supported and rallied around. What makes it even better, is that this is coming from unexpected places.

So, this is to say thank you!

Over the past few days, both Tracy and I have received numerous e-mails, FB messages, and texts from old friends, new friends, and people we don’t even know- all filled with encouraging words.

Notes like: “I don’t actually know either of you, but I have been following your story and I am so happy that you are getting closer to being with your girls” to “I know we haven’t seen each other in 20 years, but I have been following your adoption journey and praying for you” become balm for our souls, soothing the ache of our emotional muscles, which feel sore from a long, difficult journey.

It also reminds us that God’s provision can come (or perhaps usually comes) in ways that we would least expect. There were a lot of ways that Tracy and I simply assumed that we’d be supported and encouraged, that didn’t happen. Yet, God provided in ways that were far better: things like missionaries we’ve never met offering to host us in their home, travelers willing to pick us up at the airport, an anonymous gift card for the first batch of post-adoption groceries being put in the offering at church, an old friend sending Christmas gifts to give to the girls, people from our small group faithfully praying with and for us each week, developing an amazing community and support system with other families adopting from Peru, and the list goes on! Now that we stand on the far side of the process, we’re happy that God chose to meet our needs in the unexpected ways versus the traditional ones that are often taken for granted.

We’re deeply thankful for all of you who have reached out to us, and just want to let you know how much your notes and e-mails mean to us: especially those of you whom we don’t even know and who have become part of the unexpected blessings of our process. (And if we haven't heard from you yet, we'd love to!)

-Ben

100th POST

I did not time it this way but our 100th post is EXCITING!  We booked our tickets to PERU late last evening.  ALL necessary adoption documents are in Lima.  Translation is being done on the birth certificate and related documents form Spanish to English so they can delivered to the US Embassy where our official invite to travel will be issued.

Flights need to be booked 7 days in advance and additionally the day they are booked MATTERS!  After much research over the last 4 months and conversation with our travel agent, tickets were slated to increase by over $400.00 a piece for round trip tickets and the high price of one way tickets, which are even more than our round trip tickets were astounding!  Once the invite is generated nothing holds us back from being united with our daughters.  To wait another 7 days plus the best day to purchase is NOT a reason to delay this union any longer.  After much consideration, prayer, pros and cons, scheduling these flights a week out, and taking people at their word to do what they have said could and would happen we made the BEST decision we could.

We talked to the girls yesterday afternoon to tell them the all the necessary papers were collected and that it would just be a little bit longer. Our sweet Julissa tried her best to pin us to an exact date and time!  She was very talkative and interactive with us and had some very mature questions for us.  Our little Johanna was asking Julissa when we were coming before she even had a chance to get on the phone.  They are eager, they are ready, they are anxious and yet they are holding onto HOPE. 

We are almost there.  Thank you again and again to all of you who have been on this journey with us and those of you who have joined us along the way.  We are so thankful for the love and support we have received.  What an incredible blessing you have been to us.

Words?

We have few words this week as we were hopeful that last week was the week.  As Monday turned to Tuesday and Tuesday turned to Wednesday we were in disbelief.  Our updates are scarce from our agency.  We have stopped emailing and calling as we have found it unhelpful and frustrating.  They function on the belief that international adoption is full of unknowns and delays and are very comfortable with this premise.  We did receive an update on Thursday afternoon that the notary did process the note to the civil registrar to correct the birth certificate.  She has not yet generated the new birth certificate which needs to be sent to the Embassy so that we can travel.  So here is to tomorrow where the birth certificate is generated and bussed to Lima for translation and delivered to the Embassy.  Continued prayers are appreciated!