It's official!!!

It’s been a month, and I have lots to say today!
When I wrote last, we were on our way to the approval meeting in Toronto, at our agency. On the day of the appointment, we dropped our oldest 3 children off at the bus stop and our youngest child at a good friend’s house.
[Many of our close friends have been incredibly supportive and helpful in this whole process, watching our kids, writing reference letter after reference letter....we are so thankful for our friends!!! It is so important to have a strong support system while you are adopting, during the process and after!]
So we were on our way.  It was our first day alone in weeks, so it was a bit of a date for us I guess, and it was great to have the time to talk on the way to Toronto.
We arrived at the consulate’s office at 10, just as it was opening.  We met with the consulate, who signed and sealed our documents and we were out of there in about 20 minutes.  Thinking we would have to wait a long time, we had not scheduled our adoption meeting until after lunch.  So, while we waited, we went to a local Afghan restaurant and ate some delicious kabobs for lunch.  Toronto is a fabulous place to try all sorts of different foods, and we’ve tried to eat at a different ethnic restaurant whenever we go.
After our meal we headed to our agency.  We handed in our papers and documents, signed some more papers and documents and wrote out a cheque!  And our adoption became OFFICIAL!!
One exciting thing that we talked about at the meeting, was the appointment of a sort of liaison in Guyana.  This is a woman that has just been hired by our agency since we last spoke to them.  She will be in Guyana, working on our behalf to find a suitable match for our family.  She will be doing the work that we were expecting to have to do on our first trip.  Her job will be to identify a child that matches our government criteria (namely born after July 2010), making sure that child is adoptable, and getting a medical done for them before we even hear about it.
Basically it is saving us a trip!  We don’t have to travel to each individual orphanage anymore looking for a baby, we will just get a referral like most other countries do.  This is a huge relief on many levels.  We are excited that we are not required to go “pick” a child as this task seemed impossible!   Also, we are thrilled that we may not have to go to Guyana 3 times.  We love the idea of going to see the country where our child was born, but it will be so hard to leave our other children behind every time.  One less trip is also much more affordable, (although we are paying extra to have a liaison in place it’s still less then paying for 2 more flights!).
So now, our papers are on their way to Guyana.  Actually by now they are probably sitting on the desk of our liaison!

And we wait.  This time though, we are waiting for a phone call saying that a baby has been found!!!!

This call could come anytime.  More then likely it won’t be next week, and realistically it could take months.  But, it could be as soon as NOVEMBER!!!!
Now, this first trip will be a shorter one.  Maybe as long as 10 days or as short as just a week.  We will go to Guyana, meet our baby :) and register the adoption with the courts in Guyana.  Then, when our intentions are made known we fly back to Canada without our baby, and wait until the court reconvenes, which usually takes about 2 months.  At that time, we may travel again, this time for a longer trip of 3 or 4 weeks.  At that time we will be able to finalize the adoption and take our baby to Trinidad for a visa so we can take him or her home with us.

So for now, we have some more work to do!  We have an appointment booked at our local travel clinic for the first week of October to go get travel vaccinations.  The list is long: Tuberculosis, Typhoid,  Yellow Fever, Rabies, Hepatitis A and B, Cholera, Dengue Fever, anti malaria drugs.....we are going to be protected against everything you could think of!!  Most of these drugs are between $40 and $200, and we are very fortunate that Derek’s drug plan covers all of them!!!  What a relief!  Many of them need to be given 2 or 3 times over the course of 4-6 weeks, so that is why we are getting them right away.  We’ve also started looking at hotels, flights and other things like that, just to get a feel for what is in the country.  Pretty exciting stuff happening here!!  We are so thankful that everything is going so smoothly so far.  It’s been about a year since we first brought up the word adoption in our home, and only 9 months since our home study began and here we are getting vaccinations already!
God is so good :)

Approval!

As some of you know already we finally got our letter of approval from the government of Ontario!!!
Another step done.
So now on Thursday we head to Toronto.  First, we meet with the consulate of Guyana in Toronto.  We have a document that we have to sign in his or her presence.  Doesn't that sound important?  I think it sounds almost intimidating!  I'm not sure why we have to sign it in the presence of an official, but after we have done that we are allowed to send our documents to Guyana.

It's almost like an approval to send our approval so that we may be approved once more. Whew.


Next, we are heading to our agency for our official approval meeting.  There we will hand in our document, our 2 character references, and our marriage licence, passports will get notarized again.  This time our agency has volunteered to do that for free, which is wonderful considering how expensive it really is to get it done by a lawyer!

Oh yes, we also have to give what is called a retainer fee, which is basically a lump sum of money we give our agency in trust, for costs (paperwork, people working on our behalf in Guyana, lawyers fees, court fees, other fees, more paperworks, etc. etc. etc).

And then.....(drumroll please....) we are officially EXPECTING!!!!  (In adoption terms of course).

After this meeting our paperwork and profile will be sent to Guyana to the Red Cross Home there.  We could hear from them anytime after our paperwork gets approved by the government of Guyana.  We are thinking months, but it may be less or more depending on the availability of children.

Another Step in the Process

This week we got a letter in the mail from our adoption agency. We are about 2 or 3 weeks away from getting an approval letter from the government of Ontario!  So before we get that we have a few things to do:


We have to get 3 more reference letters (because the 6 references we handed in at the beginning of the process isn't enough :) 


We have to send in our marriage certificate and passports for the 3rd time to get notarized again!  


We have to go to the Guyanese consulate office in Toronto and sign a document in the presence of the consulate.  


Once we have this done, and we receive our letter of approval then we meet with our agency for an approval session, where more papers will be signed and of course some fees will be paid :)  


And then.......we wait for the okay from our agency to GO TO GUYANA!!!   


That could take months, or weeks.  It's up to the discretion of our agency.  They will call the Red Cross in Guyana to determine if there is a chance there may be children available now, or if we should wait a few months....so I guess time will tell.  But things are moving along again!  If you'd like to pray for us, please pray for this baby that we haven't met yet.  Most likely he or she is born already or just about to be born. It is a bit un-nerving knowing that your child is out there and you cannot protect them from anything for the first year of their life!!

Recommended for Approval!

We are done our homestudy! We finished our last interview a couple of weeks ago and felt it hadn't gone that well. I had just finished working a 24 hour shift and was a little tired and grumpy. I felt like I was arguing a lot, and Val was worried that I had put our homestudy in jeopardy. Turns out we worried for nothing. Our practitioner has finished her report (its almost 20 pages!)and we got the chance to read it this week. Val and I are very relieved to get this hurdle past us.

My mom gave Val some luggage for her birthday last week.(very thought full!) It's funny because we've been dwelling on the homestudy for so long we haven't even thought about travelling a whole lot. Even though we might not go to Guyana for a while yet, it's slowly starting to feel like more of a reality.

Guyana!!!

So, after much prayer and lots of discussion and research, we've narrowed our list of countries down to ONE :)

Guyana (pronounced gy-AN-ə), previously known as British Guiana, is on the northern coast of South America. Guyana has been a former colony of the British, Dutch, French and for 200 years the Spanish. Guyana is one of the few Caribbean countries which are not islands and

the population of Guyana is approximately 770,000. About 90% of people living there live on the coast(approximately 10% of the total land area of Guyana). The rest of the country is thick jungle, with little or no roads going into the interior.

The population of Guyana is made up of groups with ethnic backgrounds from India, Africa, Europe, China, with Aboriginal. These groups of diverse nationality backgrounds have a common language, English and Creole.

Some of the biggest problems the Guyanese people are facing are poor health care (with many people dying from AIDS, malaria, and because of bad drinking water...intestinal problems), also poverty is a huge issue.

The reason why we chose Guyana is pretty simple. We had narrowed down our choices to a few countries. Due to the fact that we already have 4 children, a lot of the countries wouldn't look twice at us. We were seriously considering Ethiopia as an option, but in the last few weeks the program for Ethiopia closed. We were also approved to go to South Africa, but the wait list is quite high and they prefer young childless couples. So, the choice left was Guyana and we are very excited about it!! We are happy that God laid out a clear choice for us because we were very uncertain which direction to take!

So, now we wait again. We haven't officially signed any papers, but we have to wait until the homestudy is done to make the next real move. Until then, we will be filing for citizenship or immigration, doing more research, making connections.