Then came the loooooooooooooooooooooooong wait. It seemed everything went wrong from day one. Everything that could go wrong did. Paperwork was done incorrectly, birth certificates were done with the foster parents listed as the parents! That makes it difficult to get your child status as an orphan with the US government which would make it impossible to get a US visa back to the states. There were inconsistencies in the paperwork and since our baby was 4 hours inland, every time something needed to be fixed someone had to take the 4 hour drive back into Ganta to get the paperwork redone and then travel back. So this was a very frustrating 10 months for me from the time of referral to the time I actually was able to get my baby and it was 19 months from the time we had started the adoption. By then we had to be refingerprinted for what seemed like the zillionth time. Not only had our fingerprints run out with the US government, our homestudy had run out too and we had to get it updated with more fingerprints at our local police station. I think by the time we were done getting our two girls we had had our fingerprints done 11 times!
Now I really didn't want to go through what I went through before with the whole getting my baby home thing so we had requested Anna (Baby Walakehwon) to be escorted home. But by September of 2005 I was really starting to get upset about the adoption taking so long while I knew others who had started after us had already had their babies come home.
A good friend of mine who I had met through the adoption of Deborah and their two girls from Liberia was traveling to Liberia to do an independent adoption of two more children. Our husbands agreed that we could go to Liberia together to complete our adoptions.
No comments:
Post a Comment