Continuing to Wait...

Sorry for not posting for over a week!!  This past week was very rough and I just couldn't make myself post anything.  The bad news continues for us.  Our attorney, Angela Maria, was supposed to go to the courts on Tuesday to pull our file out of court #9 (judge completely against adoptions).  When I talked to Lilliana on Monday, she called Angela and found out that she was stuck in the small town she was vacationing in as everyone went on strike.  She called her back-up to have her go to the courts for us.  Her back-up found out that there is no computer system so they can't pull our file and resubmit until the computers are up and running.  The courts moved over a month ago and they haven't had a computer system since then.  No one has any idea when things will be running again!  Every day last week, Angela Maria or her back-up would go to the court in the morning and be told, there is no system, come back in the afternoon (like thinks are really going to change that quick?).  Then, they would go back in the afternoon and be told, no system, come back in the morning.  Our case continues to just sit.  If you remember from previous posts, we were warned when we arrived that the judges started doing their own investigations into each case and there is an extra step that has been added so someone else has to sign off.  Each of these steps would at least double the time we thought it would take in Medellin.  Originally, we thought we would be here 3 weeks, then after being told of the extra steps, we thought 5-6 weeks.  Now, we've been here 5 weeks and our case hasn't even been submitted to the court to be worked on.  Anyway, it's been very frustrating so I put off posting hoping we would have some good news to post.

I met with Angela Maria on Saturday to go over options.  We can either continue to wait and hope the computers come up soon or we can move forward in court #9 and she can plead with the judge to start looking at our paperwork.  The problem with moving forward with this judge is that he has denied 2 adoption cases in the past (not sure when).  In both cases, the children were returned to the orphanage and the parents went home.  Then the case was restarted.  In one case, the process until the parents could return to Colombia took a year.  Then, they had to return here and start all over again.  Since we don't know how many cases this judge has approved in the past, we don't really know what our chance of this happening is.  The climate is so different down here as each judge and court is being run differently so ICBF has actually stopped any new adoptions in Medellin.  Also, the climate across Colombia on adoptions is going to change for the worse as there was a showed that aired showing a very negative side of adoptions here.  It sounds like they are going to air 3-4 additional shows.

So, with everything going on, we made the decision last night to wait for the computers to come up and hope when we are resubmitted, it won't be in court #9.  We never thought there was even a small chance that we would be leaving here without David but we are thinking this could be a possibility.

There are very few families left here that are adopting.  I was really looking forward to meeting another family that was here but they received their approval and left last week.  They were going to email me their guide's email info so I could try to set up a time to meet some of the other families at the hotel but I never heard back from them.  Lilliana and Raquel (head of Casa de Maria) have both called the hotel asking if we could get a day pass so we could use the pool and try to meet other families but were both told they no longer do this.  So, without having a contact there, we couldn't just show up at the hotel.

So, now for the good news.  We are finally going to meet another family today!!  Lilliana got in touch with the family yesterday and we are headed to the hotel for lunch.  They have a son that is 1 year younger than Tavo and are adopting a baby boy that just turned one.  I talked to the mother yesterday and she seems like such a nice woman.  I am hoping their older son and Gustavo have a great time playing together and we talked last night about how lonely both of our sons are.  I am so excited to have something different to do besides going to a mall today.  Finally, after 5 weeks, we are going to be able to talk to another family.  Yeah!!!

Our other good news is that Sanaya will be arriving later tonight and will have 6 full days with us.  We can't wait to see her and also start exploring Medellin again and showing her some of our favorite places!

I'll post later on our adventures last week with pictures but wanted to update everyone on the process.  Usually bad news comes in 3's, right?  Here's hoping good news also comes in 3's as we have 2 and the computers coming up this week would be 3!

More to come!  We can't wait to get home and see how grandpa is doing, meet baby Cassie and catch up with all of our family and friends!