Safi and Sifa come home!

June 8, 2016.  After over three years of waiting, we finally went to the airport to greet our daughters Sifa and Safi.  

A day of the greatest joy imaginable but also fear and anxiety. I look at these pictures and I see it all and I grieve for Safi and Sifa.  It is a very hard thing for a five and six year old to leave the only life they know and join a already-made family who doesn't even speak their language.  Can you imagine asking your child to do that? It is heartbreaking, and you can see it on their faces in these pictures. 

 I debated in my mind for a long time about whether to invite other people to the airport.  I knew it would be overwhelming for the girls no matter what, so I decided to go for it.  I wanted them to be able to look back on these pictures and see a tiny portion of the people who prayed for them and celebrated with us.

I  felt like I was going to pass-out or throw-up at this point.I had to keep reminding myself to breathe.  I felt so happy they were home but so sad for them and so scared about helping them through it. Add in three years of off-the-chart stress and the lingering sadness of my mom's death six weeks before this, and my body was a mess.

Oh, Sifa.  I can barely recognize you here.  I am so glad we know each other better now. You tried to put those gold shoes on last week and could not for the life of you squeeze into them.

Coming home to find our home had been secretly decorated buoyed me up more than I could ever describe.  I knew it had been done by some women who had prayed long and hard for us.

It was a day none of us will ever forget.  We talk about it often with Simone and Safi.  They laugh at how much Sifa (Simone) hated me then. I am glad we are were we are and I know time will only bond us closer.

I believe it is political, yes I do.

I am a little worn out about all this adoption stuff, and I think you probably are too.  If we are friends on Facebook, you see me “like” dozens of posts every day about our adoption situation, and I ask you to do things you have probably never done before, like call your Congressmen, and call the White House comment line to leave a message for President Obama.  It gets tiring for me, so I can only imagine how it is for you. 

I just want to say “Thank You.”  This has been one of those somewhat awkward situations for me for months, where over and over again I have been the recipient of so many kind inquiries and kind words and prayers.  My friends and family have stepped up over and over again when I ask them to speak up for us, each time with enthusiasm and compassion.  Awkward, but really just so humbling.  To watch people who I haven’t seen in years pass on a petition for me, or to hear that a cousin has called their Congressman multiple times on our behalf. 

On the evening of our candlelight vigil in Washinton DC, I dragged myself back to our hotel room, completely spent from telling our story a dozen times that day and from allowing myself to cry a river of tears with my fellow STUCK parents.  Before I fell asleep, I saw picture after picture pop up on my Facebook page of candles lit by my loved ones all across the country for our girls. I was buoyed by your support and I still am.

And honestly, I am so sick of social media.  I need a Facebook break, but I really just can’t take one right now.  It is my adoption lifeline.  I even joined Twitter, where the only thing I tweet about is the DR Congo exit permit suspension. I am even following Dr. Jill Biden on twitter because she made a trip there!

All of this is to say, I get it.  And I wish I could drop it and move on.  Oh, how I wish that.  But I can’t, because we have two daughters that are not home.  Every month we send off a big fat check to have someone else take care of them and every couple of months I get a few very sad looking pictures. 

A lot of you are parents out there.  Have you ever sat down and discussed who would take care of your kids if you die?  If you are lucky like me, you have many wonderful  people in your life who would do a loving job parenting your kids.  But isn’t it still torture to assign that job to someone else?  That privilege of loving your children, of drying their tears, teaching them, watching them grow.  You want to be the one serving them with all your heart. 

That is what I want, plain and simple.  To take care our daughters. I have decided that it really is a form of torture to grant a caring couple that stewardship- that sacred responsibility of being a parent -and then not allow them to actually carry out the responsibilities of that stewardship.  We have been their parents for nearly a year and we just want to do our job.

So I will keep up the social campaign and since I know you have all signed our latest petition, I am asking you to please pass it on to your friends.  If you know anyone who has a following on their blog, Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, please use your voice and ask them to help us by posting this petition on Monday, July 28 and asking their followers to sign. We have President Obama’s attention, and we need to keep it and right now everyone seems a little weary.  Yes, I am asking you to use your relationships to help our cause – I hope you know some people that won’t mind you doing that for a cause like this.  If they have any questions about the politics or the ethics behind it, I will tell them all about it!  I am not afraid to answer why I believe this shutdown is completely political.  Thank you for reading this post, thank you for your continued support, and thank you for thoughtfully considering who else would like to support us.

PS.  Did you see me on CNN.com?  Click here – I am on for about three seconds, crying and saying we are in DC trying to bring our daughters home.  That was an emotionally exhausting day.

Answering

We began our adoption of two sisters from the DR Congo last February after a ten year long desire to adopt. This adoption process has been intensely invasive.  It started with our home-study over a year ago, where we sat with an almost stranger for hours and discussed our values, parenting beliefs, life experiences, religion, and home life.  We sat with this social worker in our home, let her look at every nook and cranny, and let her ask our children questions.   It continued with background checks and multiple sets of fingerprints sent to the state and the FBI.  Add in physicals for everyone in our family and a complete disclosure of all our finances to every party involved,  and endless paperwork filled out for the Department of State, the Congo courts, and our adoption agency.  We have never exposed ourselves so completely and been scrutinized so closely. 

AND THAT IS OKAY.  It is for the sake of the the children who deserve to be placed in home where they have a chance at love and safety.

We are in the very final stages of our adoption.  We got through court in the DR Congo last summer and are the legal parents of our girls.  We have passed the immigration steps that we need to, and are currently 4 months into the 3-6months it is supposed to take for the US Embassy in Kinshasa to investigate our adoption to ensure it was completed ethically.  Once that step in complete (which could happen any day), they will set a date to issue our daughters’ visas to come home.

Sadly, these visas will be worthless. In the DR Congo, even when you have your children and their visas in hand, the last step to leaving the country is obtaining an exit letter from the entity of their government that handles immigration – this entity is called the DGM.  Last September, the DGM decided to stop issuing these exit letters to adopted children.  They made this decision amid rumors of adoption fraud and “rehoming”.  Their stated plan was to shut down for up to a year to restructure and investigate. 

Chad and I, and every adoptive parent I know, are firmly committed to ethical adoptions and we want the DGM, and every party involved in adoption, to do all that they possibly can to ensure that each child placed in a home truly needs a home and will be treated well.  We are in this for the children. 

This shut-down is complicated and I am giving you all these details so that you know I am not trying to oversimplify the issue or turn a blind eye to the issues in adoption. We want the DGM to dig deep into whatever suspicions they have.  

Our problem with this mess is the complete freeze of exit letters that has taken place and the lack of a plan.  It has been over six months. What exactly is the DGM doing to investigate?  How will this change the adoption process?  Exactly how many families and children are being affected?  How will they work through the enormous backlog when they finally do issue exit letters again? Do exit letters have to stop completely while all of this happens? Can they let families who were through court before the shutdown take their children home? The U.S. Department of State cannot answer some of the most basic questions put forth to them. Just a couple of weeks ago in a conference call with adoptive parents , they told us that the freeze would be in place until at least September, and gave us little hope that it would actually be lifted then.  So we are left with a hundred questions and no answers, and very little hope. If the US Department of State isn’t asking these questions and getting answers for us, who will?

In the meantime, literally hundreds of children are waiting for their families. The Congo courts are still (more slowly) issuing adoption adoption decrees and the US Embassy is still (more slowly) issuing visas for these children to go home.  Every day that passes with this suspension in place adds to the number of children waiting and adds to the wait once the suspension is over.

Our situation, as depressing as it is, it not as sad as other families I know –  a mother who went to the country to pick up their daughter after being promised they would receive an exit letter, stayed with her for five months, had to return to her children and husband at home and is still waiting to bring her home… a father missing the birth of a child while trying to get his adopted children home….. and so many families who have spent every dime of their savings on their adoption and who are now scraping together money to pay monthly foster care fees that have no end in sight.

If these children are waiting and waiting to begin their lives with families, it needs to be for a real reason.

We want a voice.  We want our children to have a voice. That voice should be coming from our government and it is not. 

We have answered every question asked of us and we deserve the same respect. 

This isn’t an issue of diplomacy, this is an issue of apathy. We need the U.S. Department of State to care. These children matter.

These are our daughters.  We received these pictures the day we were matched with them over a year ago.  Although I have looked at these faces countless times since then, my heart still beats fast every time, because I know they are worth it.  These two girls matter.  Every day of their life matters.

Today, please take the time to sign this petition and fill out letters at the end of it.  Please share this blog post on Facebook, through email, on Twitter, and on Instagram.  Use the hashtag #DRCStuck.