Waiting

Sorry it has been so long since I posted, but all has been quiet. We are currently in the waiting for our referral time, which means waiting on finding out who our daughter is going to be. This process normally takes 2-4 months, but there has been some delays down in Haiti. The govenment is adding some steps, so the process is taking a little longer. The orphanage can't get the kids they have to their forever families, so no new kids are coming in. The process is now taking 3-5 months, which is still pretty fast. Thank God I have two kids already or I would probably be going crazy. Brian and I watched American Idol last week, where they showed the poverty of kids all over the world. After watching that, it made us want our daughter all the more. All in God's timing and His timing is perfect! The following is from Dixie, who is in charge down in the Haiti orphanage....

UPDATE April 26, 2007
We are unable to give new proposals as quickly as we always have done them. We used to give a proposal to a family within 1 month of their dossier arriving in Haiti. Today, it is taking 3 to 5 months for a proposal. Due to some delays with adoptions, we have not been able to send children to their forever families for a couple months. This means that we have no beds to take new children into the orphanage. We have to turn them away.
We have 32 children waiting for passports. The Ministry of Interior, responsible for approving the passports, has added a step in the process. They did not tell anyone that they were adding this step; however, no adoption passports have been approved since January. Finally in early April, we were told that the lawyer needs to fill out a form. They have since changed their mind, and now anyone from the orphanage can go to the Ministry of Interior and fill out this special form asking for the child's passport.
The form is very long, asking for a lot of information about each adoptive parent. LaDawn spent one whole day this week just finding the information for the forms, so that Terriot can go and fill them out. Of course, when he arrived with 32 forms, they would not receive him and gave him an appointment for Friday, the 27th. They told him they could not do all of them in one day, and he would need to come back three days next week to get them all filled out. They will not give us the forms so we can fill them out in advance. Rather, we must fill them out sitting with the person in charge of doing the form.
We are praying that once we have filled out and submitted these forms, that the passports will be approved quickly and we can get some children home and beds opened up!
Parquet is better, but still not going quite as smoothly as we would like. We have heard that they are adding lawyers (commissioners) to approve the dossiers. They added one person already and immediately we received a dossier that said the parents could not adopt because of a problem! It was sent back to Parquet and a commissioner that had been there longer fixed it. However, we fear there might be more problems until the new Haitian Adoption Law is legalized.
Now, having said all of the above, we did take in 4 children this week. Two are newborn babies that we felt needed to be taken in now. Please pray with us that we can get passports quickly and children out of Haiti to their forever families. Pray that we can find beds for the children coming in to the orphanage. For those of you waiting for a proposal, I look at your dossiers every day. I have not forgotten any of you! Hopefully, I can start giving out some proposals in the next week or two. Once children start going home, then we should be back to normal on giving proposals and families will not have the long wait.
And Life in Haiti goes on...

We are one of the ones waiting on our proposal. Pray that the process speeds up, so that these kids can get out of the orphanage and into their forever homes...
Love,
Allison