We Won't Be Home For Christmas

We won't be home for Christmas.  We won't be home in 2013.  The Ugandan visas will expire before the American ones materialize.  We need a new apartment.

I just re-arranged my schedule and spent the afternoon driving back and forth down Ggaba Rd to go to an adoptive parent meeting at the American Embassy, to which children were not allowed.  That is not a very welcoming policy, and it was not a very nice meeting.  An American woman stood up and went through the bullet points on her powerpoint presentation at lightening speed.  Since she would only talk about "generalities" and almost anything anyone could ask sounded like a "specific case," as would giving an example for anything she said, there was not much reason to pause.  So now I know a smiling face inside the imposing Embassy building, as my networking husband suggested... and it was crystal clear exactly how little help or empathy I can expect.

So I have been waiting and waiting for all these months for a few papers, and now the point of getting papers is close at hand; we expect the judge to complete the guardianship orders any day now.  But then we need more and more layers of papers.  This is the point where most prospective parents arrive, and are advised to wait patiently.  And wait patiently some more.

After we get the guardianship orders, we can apply for Ugandan passports.  That will take about a week.  When we have photo ID, such as passports, we can take the girls for a medical examination at the IOM.  Within another week or so, they will forward the results to the American Embassy.  Once we have the passports, the guardianship orders, and the IOM results, we can email the Embassy for an appointment.  This is a checking-your-paperwork appointment, and they just look over the paperwork and advise you on whether it is complete or not.  They only have those appointments on Monday and Wednesday mornings.  Then they can schedule you for another complete appointment to evaluate whether the children can earn two really boring-sounding pieces of paper with names like DM-260 or something like that, which mean the children can actually enter our beautiful but very exclusive country.  They only schedule those appointments on Monday and Wednesday afternoons.  If you just so happened to have all your paperwork, everyone who needs to testify is ready to show up, and there is no one else scheduled, they could hypothetically schedule you for the same afternoon.

If no one else was already scheduled.  In one of her less hypothetical statements, the presenter said that during busy times the wait can be up to two weeks (or maybe three).  And that December is a busy time.  That is ALMOST like saying the current wait time is at least two weeks between the preliminary and the main appointment.

If there is even one tenth of one percent of a doubt in her mind that the case is not clearly approvable and the children meet all the criteria for both sets of boringly-named papers, then she sends the case to Nairobi, and then followed a bunch of details about how long it takes to compile paperwork and for it to sit in the mail, and then on a desk in Nairobi.  But let's ignore that, because one thing I have learned in this journey is to take problems as they come up and not worry about them beforehand.  So we have gotten to waiting and having this second appointment scheduled, at which the presence is firmly REQUIRED of one adoptive parent, the children in question, and ANY AND ALL living birth parents, and possibly other relatives although they wouldn't be able to tell you whether or not they were needed in advance.  Then, if you have managed to guess correctly at all the things they will need to see and they decide there is not even one tenth of one percent of a doubt, then you wait TWO DAYS for the visa and "travel packet."  There are NO EXCEPTIONS to the two days part.  It takes two days. That would be two.

(She would not discuss specific cases, but she was quite emphatic on the general points.)

The "travel packet" is for US customs officials on the point of entry (she discussed what a point of entry was), and it must be still sealed.  Apparently, this requires not only refraining from opening them oneself, but potentially guarding them from over-zealous Ugandan customs officials.  It is recommended to carry a bagazillion other papers in order to convince the Ugandan customs officials that you are allowed to take the children with American visas to America.

We had previously heard that the US Embassy is not taking a full Christmas break, and will be open on all the days that aren't the official holidays, which leaves the 23rd and 30th as Mondays for appointments.  But it turns out that they are not hosting appointments on the 23rd and 30th.  Thus, there are two weeks with no appointments available, which looks a little bit like a taking a two-week holiday.  That also means that there are exactly three days left in the entire month of December during which they are hosting appointments, which would be tomorrow, and next Monday and Wednesday.  Which means that if we managed to be handed the guardianship papers tonight, and took the week for getting the IOM reports and passports simultaneously (and they don't go simultaneously), that we could be told next Wednesday that we would have to wait two weeks for an appointment.  But the two weeks we were waiting would be in January.


And after the meeting I stopped at the supermarket for yogurt and juice, which get kind of heavy to carry up hills while also carrying the local three-year-old, so are worthwhile to buy on a hired-car-day.  Then I picked up all the children from school, and paid some extra for leaving Buttercup there.  I told the kids the sad news, but some more long waiting sounds pretty much like business as usual for them and they mostly just sang a weird little song about jelly.  As we got home, the raggle-tag bunch of children in the house next door started yelling through the hedge, and my children went over and yelled at them back.  And the they threw something through the hedge at us.  What is the randomest thing you can imagine getting thrown through a hedge?

A cat.  So now we have a raggle-tag little kitten crouched under our outdoor sink, and my kids have spent the last hour or so hovering over the poor little creature, and begging me to let them feed it everything under the sun and especially lots of dishes of milk.  They have also carried the kitten back and forth, put him in a tree (and taken him down, I think), made him a bed, brought balls to play with him, and read him a number of books. (Unless it's a her.)  Emerson reports that the cat asked for water to be poured in his bed (???), Hibiscus reports that the cat just said "EEEE," and Buttercup comes running back and forth to report that there is a cat, and that there is still a cat, and continues to be a cat (these are the various updates).  I am not sure if my sad motherly heart is open to being sad for this poor little skinny creature, or if I have enough of being motherly and am ready to throw him back over the fence -- very gently, I don't actually throw animals -- but my children are more open-hearted and generous than I am.  "Look, now the kitten loves us!" they report.

How I love those children.


I was girding my heart to be ready to stay longer, but hearing it as a fact is still painful.  I love my husband too, and overall I would have much preferred my own, pre-domesticated and fully vaccinated cats.  But I'm glad the children can find joy in raggle-tag Ugandan kittens, too.  Because I like seeing them find joy, and because those are the only kind of cats we'll be seeing for a while.