Disappointing News

Well, this hasn't been the joyful weekend that I was anticipating. On Tuesday night, there began to be some rumblings of possible security issues in Guatemala. My source of these initial rumblings was on the adoption.com forums that I frequent. As rumors often get started here, I emailed my agency late Tuesday night to see if they knew of anything that was happening. I received an email and call at 10:00 on Wednesday that said that everything was fine and that there should be no problem with Peggy & I leaving the following day. I kept an eye on the forum during the day and heard nothing from my agency so felt secure that all would be fine for our trip. When I got home about 6:00 Wednesday night, I had a message from my social worker asking me to call her on her cell phone as soon as I received her message. My heart just dropped into my stomache. She said that the agency director had been communicating with the lawyers all day and that they had decided that all visit trips should be suspended for now and that I should not travel down Thursday. I was told that I could travel but they were advising the foster parents to not take the children out. I checked with the airline who said that they would issue a credit and we could use the amount in the next year for a $100 change fee. I decided to wait until Thursday to make a final decision to see if by some twist in fate that it was all just a bad dream and that things would settle down. By Thursday noon, the agency still said no to travelling. I was pretty upset and depressed.

I finally pulled myself together and went over to Peggy's where we had a pity party and worked on our quilt projects. Then we went out to dinner and made Tom (Peggy's husband) keep the kids so he could at least have a couple of hours of child care since he was getting out of 5 days worth.

I was going to go to work on Friday but when I woke up decided I just couldn't face it yet so I stayed home and continued my pity party. Saturday night I was able to go over and meet up with a couple of other women who are in the process of adopting children from Guatemala that I had met on the forum. We ended up talking until about 1:00 am. It was a really nice support group.

So now I am gearing up to go into work tomorrow and face all the questions about why I am there and not in Guatemala with my beautiful daughter.

If you want to read more information about the situation in Guatemala you can visit www.guatadopt.com. This is a very good website talking about the current events in Guatemala as relating to adoptions.

Here is a picture I received from the foster family on Thursday when I emailed them and told them I would not be coming.

Hopefully we will get good news this week that we can reschedule our trip or go pickup her up for good.

Susan