Provisional Approval

There is a story behind this.

On March 3rd, we received a pink paper from immigration.  This made me nervous because to date, no approval notices had been on pink paper.  Sure enough, I opened it to find that it was a request for more information regarding our case. :(  I was frustrated by this, feeling like this was going to be another delay in the adoption process.  I emailed our agency and patiently impatiently waited for a response.

Back track to earlier in my day... 

Something which really stuck out to me in my morning devotions that day (March 3rd) was that I needed to trust God in all areas.  Faith/ trust is necessary for pleasing Him.   When I received the "pink slip" from immigration, I could hear the echo of my devotions with the question, "Do you trust me?"  I confess that I struggled with this and argued with God about why having the approval now is how this should work.  After several minutes, I let go and chose to trust Him with the timing of this approval.

One hour later...

To my surprise, the email I received back said that it was already taken care of : Jana had been in communication with the immigration officer during the previous week to clarify some confusion regarding some of the referral information, and we were told to disregard the notice.  She was not even sure why they bothered to mail it.  Yay! (There is a big "thank you" to Jana who was working for us behind the scenes before we even knew there was a need for it.)  It is interesting, isn't it?  It is  like God knew already how it would turn out and only had that "request for information" sent to us to test me and show me that I needed to remember Who is in control here.

Six days later...

I am happy to say that we have our provisional approval!  It came in the mail today, and guess what the approval date was.  March 3rd!! Really?!  While I was stressing out over getting a seeming delay with the information request, God knew that was the very date the approval was given.  Again...maybe He wanted to see if I would trust Him?  We were told to expect this to take four to six weeks, and we received it in four weeks.  

With the exception of the week we received our official referral and worked on I-800 forms, we have spent the last three months waiting for approvals from immigration.  Now we can move on to the Article 5, which we are told we should have next week.


An update on our prayer requests from this post...

The rest of this process goes as follows:  we get the Article 5, then the final approval from the Polish government, then everything goes to the local court.   We mentioned last month that the judges may or may not issue travel dates quickly, and we were told today that it seems that lately the judges have really not been in any hurry to move forward.  Once our information gets to the local judge, we could be given travel dates in a couple weeks...or six months.  We are praying specifically for early May travel dates, and we would appreciate you joining us in specific prayer concerning this. (Our original desire was to travel by our daughter's birthday which is is a few weeks.  As often happens in the adoption process, things took longer than we hoped, so that is unlikely.) We do not have control over the timing, but we know Someone Who does! :-)

Official Referral

We have the official referral!

Because this process has been full of weeks and sometimes months of very little to report, it is a little head spinning to see how fast things progressed this week.  On Sunday I posted about our immigration approval.  Monday, Jana said via email that she would find out where our dossier is in the translation process and that while we were waiting, we could start filling out the I-800 ("Petition To Classify Convention Adoptee as an Immediate Relative"), the I-800 supplement 1, and the 864-W forms. Today in a phone conversation we were told that our immigration had come in at a perfect time.  The agency's worker in Poland,  who meets with the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy (Poland's National Adoption Center),  already had a meeting scheduled and brought our information with him to the meeting.  We were approved, the official referral from the Polish government was issued, and we received it this morning.  Wow!  Immigration approval and the official referral in four days!

This is where the above mentioned forms (I-800, etc.) come into play.  Those forms have to be sent in to U.S. immigration to approve this specific child to come to and reside in the United States.  We finished filling them out and overnighted them to Lifeline today.  They will arrive in Alabama tomorrow and be mailed to the U.S. immigration center in the next few days.  It is our understanding that it can take four to six weeks to get back and have in our hands.  

Now to the question we have been asked: Does this mean we will travel sooner?  The short answer is, "I don't know".  Getting the official referral so quickly does mean that things moved fast for those steps, but once we get the child specific forms back, it is sent to the embassy in Warsaw, Poland.  We wait for a letter from the U.S. embassy to be written and given to the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy (I think. lol).  We are then issued a final approval from them (Ministry of Labor....) and everything is sent to the local court.  From there, it up to the judge how quickly he/she assigns the court date (which means travel dates).  This can happen rapidly...or not. 

If you are wondering how to pray, please pray about the time frames that will be out of our control.  Here are a couple of specifics:

1)  Please pray that we get everything done in a timely manner and to the desk of the judge (see above for the steps before we get there). 

2) Pray that once the judge gets our information, he/she will get to our case quickly and not wait for weeks (or months) to give us a court date (bonding period which will determine the length of our stay in Poland).