Trip number two to Haiti

I am sitting in a hotel across from the Miami airport. Bright and early tomorrow morning Weston, Sophie (our almost 11 year old) and I will board a plane bound for Haiti. Sophie is so excited she can hardly sit still. This trip we are staying at a different guest house; the guest house affiliated with Christina's orphanage. I am hoping the accommodations and food are comparable to our last stay. And this time Christina will be staying with us at the guest house. I am excited and nervous -- what if she freaks out? Or is completely unresponsive? How will we communicate with her? And how in the world will I fix her hair each day? We hope to take the girls on an outing to a hotel with a pool so they can play together. And maybe visit a marketplace. But as Weston says, we really have no expectations for the trip. We are going to take it one minute at a time. I will post as often as I am able -- hopefully the Internet will work at the guesthouse. You will have to excuse my spelling and punctuation, and lack of paragraphs. The iPad is not working correctly with blogger and I can't format anything right now. I will have to reformat when I have access to my computer again. So here we go with trip number two to visit Christina!

Happy Birthday, Christina!

Today is Christina's 4th birthday.  Our family is going to celebrate with Haitian chicken, rice and beans and a Haitian cake.  But Christina won't get to have any of it.  Because our paperwork, while finally in the Haitian system (we received our IBESR file number November 22) is in the black hole of the Haitian government.

I have heard rumors that President Martelly signed a few dossiers when Oprah visited Haiti the second week of December.  Then he supposedly signed another 100 dossiers on December 23.  I got an e-mail from a friend who said she heard (don't you just love how Haitian adoption news gets spread like gossip?  Because there just doesn't seem to be any sort of informed communication flow, we all cling to I heard this or I read that but none of us really knows the truth.) that Martelly still has an additional 400 - 400! - dossiers waiting to be signed.  Ours is most likely one of those 400.  So if he signs 80-100 every 3-6 months, which seems to be his modus operandi, he is a year behind, not including the dossiers that get added to the pile each month.

I was clinging to the thought that next year, on Christina's 5th birthday she will be here and we will celebrate together.  Now I am not so sure.  And that makes me really sad.  And angry.  And frustrated.  But all I can do is pray to God that He move mountains (literally, mountains of paperwork!) so that Christina can be home by next January.

I don't know if the orphanage celebrates birthdays.  I do know they celebrated Christmas, with a present for each child (donated by a local charity) a festive Christmas tree, and a feast served on special plates.

But will Christina blow out 4 candles today?  Will she get a piece of birthday cake?  Our family has always celebrated birthdays with parties, presents, cake and ice cream, a special dinner for the birthday child...sometimes our birthday celebrations end up being birthday week celebrations.

I pray that she knows today is a special day for her.  I pray that next year she gets to celebrate with her family who loves her and misses her and wants nothing more for her to be home.

Christina opening her present

Such a sad face!

Afterthoughts...

We've been home from our trip to Haiti for just over a week now.  I have had some time to reflect on and process all that I experienced.  My first shower back was heavenly -- warm and clean water!  Washing my face with water for the first time in a week was divine.  I hope I never take that for granted again.  I missed my kids so much and I was glad to be back home with them (and even the dog and cat were a welcome sight).

Christina and her daddy

I am thrilled that after looking through our pictures of the trip, our kids are they are excited to visit Christina in the future.  They all took pictures to school to show their teachers and friends, even my oldest, who was the most resistant to the adoption.  I will never forget the laugh in his voice as he commented "we are going to have our hands full, she is a nut!" as he watched a video of us playing with Christina.

Eating lunch

The hardest thing about the trip was having to leave Christina behind. She is well cared for and safe.  She has plenty of food and sweet friends to play with.  But she doesn't have a mom or dad or siblings.  No nanny, however wonderful, can fill those shoes.  It was so hard to hear that even with our surprise court date and our paperwork finally reaching IBESR (Haitian Social Services) that we still have 17 months to wait.  Seventeen months!

Why 17 months?  Because we have to wait for the Haitian President to sign off on our documents, saying he approves of our adoption.  That can take up to 6 months alone -- our paperwork sitting in some pile on someone's desk in the Presidential Palace, waiting until he has enough adoption cases to make the time to sign them all.  Then multiple Directors from multiple governmental offices have to sign the documents.  Again, our paperwork can languish on each of these desks up to three months.  Pretty soon those months add up to 17.

I know our paperwork is not important to these people.  Christina is just one child in a country full of orphaned children.  I am sure there are many more important issues they have to deal with daily -- Haiti is a country with significant challenges.  I have been researching different Haitian blogs and news articles trying to understand their culture and politics.  Race and oppression is a huge hot button. Americans are not exactly loved by the Haitian people.  And they do not love the fact that we are taking one of their own away from their country.

I am going to have to learn how to do her hair!
Giving us a sad face -- this is how she greeted us each day, such sad eyes.

Me, I would rather Christina have the opportunity to stay in Haiti as well.  To be with her birth family, to keep her language and culture.  But there is nothing for her in Haiti.  No family, no opportunity.  Nothing but growing up in an orphanage and someday being forced to live on the streets or in a tent, with no job prospects, no future.

Even though we only spent four short days with her, she is ours.  Despite the challenges we know we will face, we know she belongs with our family.  We are excited to be a Haitian-American family, to learn Kreyol and Haitian traditions and incorporate them into our own.

We spent a lot of time drawing pictures together.

So my prayer is that those 17 months shorten to 9 months.  That each step takes the shortest time possible, that each Official feels an overwhelming urge to clear his/her desk of all paperwork.  That the President decides to sign adoption dispensations the day our paperwork hits his office.  9 months allows  for all of the necessary steps without any unnecessary delays.  The only way we can get it done in 9 months is through a miracle.  It has never before been done that quickly in the history of Haitian adoptions.  I know we don't deserve a shorter wait time than any other family going through the adoption process.  But I am praying anyway, because we serve a huge God who has a perfect plan for Christina.