More Photos, More Waiting...

Well, here we are again, a little farther along the path of not knowing anything.....
Turns out that our initial approval to adopt abroad was held in the Portland immigration office rather than being forwarded to Guatemala. So we have been working with our agency to notify that office that we need to have the form cabled down. We´re hoping to hear from the agency today whether it was sent down, and I´m going to the embassy with the lawyer´s messenger at the 3:45 ´pink slip´distribution time, in order to confirm details about the problem if the pink slip does not, in fact, show. After that, if necessary, we´ll let Darlene Hooley´s staff penetrate the labyrinth of the immigration department for us. That´s the long-story-short version. We´ll be happy to bore you with the long-story-longer version when we see you next.

Our stay here at La Casa Grande has helped put our own situation in perspective. There are a lot of other adoptive couples cycling through, and while a few are gliding through more quickly, plenty are hitting even more land mines. We´ve befriended a coulple of families from Michigan, who are both visiting their children pre-pick-up, as we had in the past. Today and tomorow they have to leave their kids again with their foster mothers and head home. One of them matched with their 7 1/2 month old daughter about the same time we did, but are only now getting ready to enter PGN. A family from Wisconson spent a year in the Russian program before learning that their agency was still working to license themselves in that country, which has anyway intituted a moratorium. They switched to Guatemala and are finally bringing home their son.
So in any event, we´re still happy with our decision to come down pre-pink-slip. Our time with Mateo´s been incredible and our delays have been just that - the normal delays we´ve been prepped to expect, and not anything that actually could jepoardize the process. If everything is just going to take longer than it should, we prefer it to take longer while we´re holding our son - and an incredible document that affirms, in very official sounding spanish, that we are his parents. And as my sister noted: ¨At least you´re getting a nice long vacation in Guatemala!¨ We´ll have future blogs on our excursions out into Mateo´s country of birth.

Above are some photos from last Saturday, when we had Mateo´s foster mother and her family to the hotel for Dinner. It was great to meet all of them. And culturally interesting. Most family members didn´t speak unless we talked to them first, deferring to the father, Francesco, seen holding up Mateo. He spoke with me most of the evening. As the men of the family we were the designated representatives, aparently.
Their son Harold, in the blue shirt, just finished High School and is entering University to study business and languages. We gave him our English/Spanish dictionary (the best edition I could find, after a typically obsessive search) to help him on his way.

Well, this internet cafe is at the base of the tower where our lawyer´s office is. It´s time to log off and head up there to check in and arrange to join their messenger on the pink slip trip....

-Matt