Trip to Indy

Yesterday I picked up the final revised papers and took the whole bundle down to Indianapolis to get apostilles for them. Apostilles are the legalization that allows the documents to be used internationally.
There ended up being 15 documents in my pack of revised papers that needed apostilles - the cut-off number for how many documents you can walk through the office at the Secretary of State in Indy. One of the additional papers we needed to have redone was Stan's state police clearance. It listed him as "female!" The facilitator in Ukraine caught the typo and the state police had a corrected document in our hands in about 3 days.
After getting the seals placed, I popped the documents in the mail to our agency in Pennsylvania. They should be arriving tomorrow. We are feeling the time crunch now as our papers will start to out date at the beginning of July. If there aren't any more hold-ups, we may be submitting the documents to the government in Ukraine in 3-4 weeks. Pray that there won't be any more surprises on our paperwork.
When we were living overseas, there were a handful of people who made this mad dash to Indy for us when we couldn't do it ourselves. As I was driving down and back, I was thanking God for friends and family who stepped in to give us a hand. Thanks, everyone of you who have helped out in one way or another. We appreciate all you've done to help.

Paperwork in Ukraine

We watched the Fedex tracking site this past week as our bundle of paperwork traveled to Ukraine. It arrived on May 5th and on May 6th we got an email listing all the paperwork that needs to be re-worked. We need to revise about 8 documents including the home study and the physicals. I'm glad for an unexpected vacation day today (the doctor I work with is on his annual birding retreat) so I can crank through some of this paperwork.
It's frustrating to have to repeat some of this work, but it is also encouraging to have such prompt attention to our paperwork by both the Ukrainian facilitator and our agency. We hope that means we are near a real submission date for our dossier. Please pray that we will be able to satisfy every detail they are asking for and that we'll be able to turn around these new documents quickly.

Does this look familiar?

If this looks familiar to you, then you've been reading since the beginning. If not, check out our first post. This is most of the documents that will make up our (third!) adoption application in Ukraine.
I hate to bore you with the details of paperwork, but this is as exciting as it gets during this stage of the process. In addition to our home study, we signed, notarized, and appostilled these pages with the help of a few notaries and the Indiana secretary of state's office. Most of these documents have been sent to Pennsylvania where our adoption agency will give them a final review before they are sent to Ukraine.
In the past couple of weeks we have been handling our "rebounds" - documents that have been rejected for being incomplete or some other error. It takes just a little bit of our attention nearly every day.
We are still waiting to receive one very important paper from Indy - our updated I-171H, our U.S. permission to adopt. We hope to have that in our hands soon and finish up this final round of paperwork.

Home Study

True to our social worker's word, the turn around time on our home study was timely. We received our home study draft on Feb 4th. Stan worked hard last weekend and got it corrected and back to our social worker by the 8th.
We've also heard back from our facilitator in Ukraine. The information he's giving us is pretty encouraging about the wait to submit the dossier. The last time we turned in our paperwork to the facilitator, the wait time was a matter of months. It looks like this time it will be a matter of weeks.
That wait doesn't start, however until after we get the paperwork sent to Ukraine. Once the home study document is finished, it will go to Indy for the USCIS department to issue an updated "permission to adopt." We are also waiting on our final copies of our physical forms (Ukraine changed the forms again and we'll have to get them filled out a second time!). There are another 12+ forms that we'll need to round up, some in duplicate, some in triplicate, but none of these will take as much time as the first few.
Paperwork is never fun, but we are glad to be moving forward once again.

A Fresh Start

It has been more than a year since my last post. Our motto for the last year could have been "We didn't see THAT coming!"
At the end of last January Stan was laid off from his job in Morocco. By the beginning of March we were back in the U.S. looking for work during the worst of the economic crisis for our area of the country. It wasn't until September that we were both working. Stan's now working at a small technical company where his dad is employed and I'm working in a clinic in Middlebury, Indiana. We are now living in Syracuse, Indiana, the small town where Stan's company is located. It's half-way between where Stan's parents live and my parents' house.
Shortly before Stan was laid off in Morocco we met with our lawyer who seemingly had run out of options for obtaining that one last letter from the government of Morocco. It seemed to confirm the leading we felt to leave Morocco for a season and pick up our adoption process in the U.S.

So here's what's happened since our last post:
We again have an income and a home
We petitioned to extend our I-171H (US permission to adopt)
Repeated our fingerprinting
Completed our interviews for our new home study
Repeated our physical

We are waiting for our home study to be written up and submitted to USCIS in Indy. Once we have a new I-171H we'll start re-assembling our dossier.
Now that we are back in the U.S. lots of people have been asking us about whether we would consider adopting domestically or from somewhere other than Ukraine. Our response to this question is simply that we don't feel any release from God to pursue adoption through a different pathway. We trust that God is unfolding his plan for our family in his perfect timing.

Perspective

Every time I glance at our seemingly obsolete blog site, I rehearse what I would potentially write in an update. Are we still waiting for the same paper from the Moroccan authorities? Yes. Has it been a crazy long time that we've been stuck on this one step? Yes. Are we out of hope? NO! Instead we've been learning contentment in this waiting place.
Once we are parents we know our lives will change drastically. We are so thankful for all that God's putting into our lives in this chapter before the kids come.
We have a Moroccan lawyer who is now working on getting this required letter. We are so thankful for someone who is taking initiative on our behalf. We get updates from him once or twice a week, letting us know what steps he's working on. He's made the rounds through the national ministry of foreign affairs and is working locally again.
Rumors are circulating again about the Ukraine opening to accept dossiers at the beginning of February. Pray that God would continue to unfold his perfect timing.

Still Making the Rounds

No word from any in Ukraine this week about paperwork submission. We are still focusing on getting that last letter from the Moroccan authorities.
This week Stan went to the equivalent of the state level government offices on Tuesday. He spoke with people in a few different offices. They were all very kind and listened attentively to the problem. Unfortunately, none of them were able to help us. They redirected Stan back to the foreigner's department in the local police station (where I started out in June).
Stan went there on Thursday, hoping to talk to a higher ranking official than the guys that normally staff the front desk. Their boss wasn't available this week because the king is in town and that keeps the whole police force busy with the logistics.
We are by no means at the end of our list of possible people, places, and angles to try. The quest, however, is taking considerable time and energy during a season that's already been tough. Please pray for endurance and creative problem solving.