Samuel Update :)

Update yesterday from Kofi:

"I have applied for the birth certificate together with the passport for Samuel and both shall be ready in two weeks time. I will mail the original documents to you as soon as I get the birth certificate. I am using express application for these documents."

The original documents are the ones that we are waiting on in order to file our last and final form with the United States Citizenship and Immigrant Services (USCIS) – the I-600 form. I mentioned before that there is a choice in which we could fly to Ghana and file the I-600 at the Embassy in Ghana instead of here in the United States. This option is supposed to be quicker….instead of 2-3 month processing time, it is supposed to take only 2-4 weeks if we were to ‘fly and file’. However, we would have to plan on staying in Ghana for those potential 2-4 weeks until things were processed, or make plans to come back after filing, and then fly back in a few weeks once everything was processed. We ended up deciding against this option, since we would have to fly back here in the mean time, and then go back again. Now I am seeing how awesome it would have been to have been able to file our I-600 on our trip to Ghana back in January. But, of course at that point we still had to go through our court date, which was why we couldn’t file it then. Anyways, I was just talking with my friends who just brought their sweet little baby home from Ethiopia. With the Ethiopia adoption process, you do fly to Ethiopia and file the I-600 there at the Embassy. But, processing time only takes a day or two. So, filing the I-600 is part of the one and only trip that you take to your child’s country to bring them home. Kinda neat how that works out. This would be my future hope for Ghana adoptions…..that they would be able to knock down the processing time of the I-600 to only a few days in Ghana. These friends that just brought their baby home from Ethiopia are the ones that I had emailed the very first week that adoption was put on our heart. I had emailed them a really long email about it all to ask them to pray for us, and in their response back they said that they too had just started in on their own international adoption! It was crazy! We have had a unique connection throughout our adoption journeys since we have been there with each other from the start. You can check out my friends’ blog at: http://nicoladoption.blogspot.com/

Samuel has been staying in foster care in Ghana. This is a requirement of the USCIS for Samuel to have ‘true orphan status’ since his mother is still living. For this status, he cannot be under the care of his mother….foster care or orphanage care is required. Samuel is staying with a foster care family in Ghana, along with a little 2 year old boy who is also in the process of being adopted by a family using our adoption agency.

Also wanted to share verses from this Psalm that a friend sent me yesterday:

Psalm 68: 4-6

Sing to God, sing praise to his name,
extol him who rides on the clouds —
his name is the LORD—
and rejoice before him.

A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows,
is God in his holy dwelling.

God sets the lonely in families,
he leads forth the prisoners with singing;
but the rebellious live in a sun-scorched land.