Baby Girl K

Around Thanksgiving, a little flurry of movement cropped up, and we were holding our breath while working through paperwork with our agency. We thought that we would soon have some exciting news to share, but now I regret not writing about that in the moment, because it has now been tempered by a more recent reality. 

Okay, let me back up a bit. 

If you recall last time I wrote, we were attempting to seek a referral for a little girl on a Waiting Children list. For ease of following in this post, I'll call her "K". Instead, another family was chosen to be presented as her match, and we were greatly saddened. It felt like a loss before we'd even had a chance. On the other hand, we were so happy for the other family, and for K. Complex feelings, yo. 

I also want to pause and thank our friends and family who have been so kind to us as we have processed our thoughts, complained, and cried. Part of me wonders what it is like to watch us swing through these emotions over and over, as the time passes painfully slowly. I imagine it is tiresome. There will be happiness to share too! We are grateful to you for you sticking by us.

So, two days before Thanksgiving, we received our agency's bi-monthly Haiti program email. In it, there was mention of two more little girls on the Waiting Children list that we wanted to learn more about. I shot an email off to our program manager, and tried to just put it out of my head, so as not to start to get my hopes up again. 

The response came back very quickly: "You've been on my to-do list...K is available for adoption again. Are you still interested in adopting her?"  My heart started racing and I couldn't get ahold of Justin fast enough to let him know of the update. Of course we were still interested! 

It turned out that after the other family was presented as a potential match for K, they learned that IBESR was already working on a referral for them. (This is fantastic for them, by the way. What a Thanksgiving blessing!) Once I confirmed that we wanted to pursue K again (YES! YES, 100 TIMES OVER!) our agency sent us two new pictures of K from their recent trip to Haiti. Here was a sweet, chubby little girl, with gleaming eyes and a gorgeous (very grumpy) pout. She was clothed in purple striped pajamas, propped on a small chair, giving the camera a very serious face. 

The next couple of weeks we set to work updating our home study and I800. If anything substantial in your family life changes (you move, you have a child, etc.), or if you make any changes to the characteristics of the child you're seeking to adopt (from one child to multiple; updating the age or gender requested; a change in medical conditions, etc.), you must update these documents. Essentially, they officially tell the involved government agencies of the changes in your life. It can be time consuming and is costly. (Surprise!) Fortunately, we only needed to make a small tweak to our home study, to capture K's medical condition, and our agency was able to help us update it without another home visit (which would incur a higher cost). This small grace took a big stress off of us. 

While waiting for our home study update to be completed, I waited (impatiently) to hear about next steps. After about a week, I reached out to the program manager to ask for an update. We anticipated it would take some time to hear back on the official referral, but I was hoping to get an idea of what that might look like. She quickly responded, stating our home study update was done and had already been submitted (hooray!) and also asked that we give her a call (that's never good).

I'll admit that any time we are asked to do something, I try to jump on it at top speed. My brain says "Hey! There's pretty much nothing controllable in this process. But this is a task assigned to you right now. So get it done! Don't  be the one holding things up!" I was in back-to-back meetings at work that day, so I asked Justin to give her a call. On the drive home that afternoon, he filled me in: things were not as we expected and we have hit another hurdle. We may not get K's referral. 

Feels like deja vu, eh? The same anticipation and similar dashed hopes. And here I'd thought I'd been guarding my heart better this time around.

To explain why this is happening, I feel I ought to add a short preface before continuing. Things in Haiti are ever-changing and I can't pretend to fully understand what is occurring between the creches and IBESR right now. What I do know is that there is a rift that they are working through. I'm piecing together what our agency reported to us, what I can find online, and what others are sharing in our online Haitian adoption group.

To clarify the "normal process" to match a child and family in Haiti:

• A child has to be"referral-ready", with their own completed dossier. As I understand it, this is often prepared by the creche the child is living in. This means a lot of document gathering and time spent. So, while we were working on our dossier, it's very likely our daughter's was being worked on too. 
• The creche also has a relationship with an adoption agency (or agencies) and may review the dossiers of families submitted by the agencies for potential matches to children in their facility. (This process has been explained in a few ways, and it's still frankly a bit muddy to me. I think that what I'm bulleting here is more applicable to Waiting Children, but I'm not 100% sure.) If the creche believes we're a suitable match, they might submit our dossier and her dossier to IBESR for review.
• IBESR, which acts as Haiti's Social Services or centralized authority for adoptions, is the government entity which reviews the dossiers and is the ultimate determiner of matches. 
• If IBESR agrees to the match, we receive word of an official referral. After this point, we will travel to Haiti for our two-week bonding/socialization trip, and this kicks off the long legalization process and eventual homecoming. There are many more steps to that, and we'll share more as we eventually work through them. 

There isn't currently a specific "Waiting Children" process in Haiti, as there are in some other countries. But, knowing that these children are in unique situations, our agency was anticipating that once the creche had agreed that we should be matched with K (which they felt pretty good about), it would be as "simple" (heh) as the creche presenting our dossier to IBESR, and IBESR confirming us as an official match with K. Then we'd be off to the races! It turns out, though, that there has been some contention building between IBESR and the creches across Haiti lately, for a variety of reasons related to the implementation of the Hague convention (and probably related to fees). As a consequence, many creches appear to be choosing to hold off on submitting dossiers to IBESR right now, or at least slowing it down substantially. If this is true, that means that families may not be matched with their children, and we may not be matched with K. 

Bumps along the way are expected as Haiti transitions into the Hague convention. When we started, were told in no uncertain terms that we would be guinea pigs as things were learned, adjusted, and stabilized. We agreed to this because we knew that our daughter was in Haiti. We will do what it takes. No one knew what the challenges would actually look like, but this was surely not what I had expected. The match with K is not truly off the table, but at this point we don't feel confident that it will come through quickly, if at all. I'll admit that I was holding out a little bit of hope for a Christmas miracle, but instead we'll hold an extra candle at Christmas Eve service this year, for K and for the other families marching along this journey. 

Love and hugs to you and your loved ones this season.