another setback

We are not leaving as planned on Tuesday, April 3rd. We will not be picking Emily up on her birthday, April 5th. We will not be home with her on April 12th. Basically, any plans we made one week ago have changed YET AGAIN due to expired paperwork.
Let me explain... (for those of you not interested in the process by which it takes a licensed agency to fail, skip to the next paragraph). When we began this adoption process we started with a form called the I-600A "Petition to Adopt an Orphan." You have to get fingerprinted, have a background check, a home study, and pay a fee of $545 to process the application. The Dept. of Homeland Security and the local Immigration/Naturalization office processes it. We had ours done in Yuma in Sept. 2005. The application, once it's approved, gets cabled to the Embassy in the country which you are adopting. At the time, we were going to the Ukraine, so it was cabled to Kiev. When we switched to Kazakhstan in January of 2006, we had to pay another fee and submit a "change" to the original application so that our approval was cabled to the Embassy in Almaty. We did that. It was sent and we were good to go. The application is good from the date of approval (Sept 12, 2005) until 18 months later. If you count the months, you will see that it would expire March 12, 2007. We assumed America World was on top of this deadline. (silly us) It is common practice for adoption agencies to take care of their families and let them know when critical paperwork is about to expire, so the family has time to update it. America World sent me a quick email on Wednesday, March 28th to ask if I had checked that document for expiration. How thoughtful of them to think to remind me to check it less than one week before I am flying to get my daughter. Because the FOUR months that we sat here waiting on court proceedings in Kaz was certainly not enough time to renew paperwork, right? Ugh. What am I paying America World for, anyway? To sit around and wait for my paperwork to expire so they can be responsible for delaying an already delayed adoption? What the ?*&^???? So they told me to submit a new application, new home study (because we moved to TN), and new fee. Yes, that's correct- they wanted us to pay another $545 to submit the application to the Memphis INS office. Would you believe I had to argue with the Executive Director of the agency to get them to pay for their mistake? I did. I spent hours on the phone Wednesday afternoon last week arguing about why America World should "right" their "wrong." They eventually did the right thing and agreed to pay the processing fee, but why did I have to fight so hard? Why was it so difficult to admit the screw-up and help us out? I may never know. But I was stressed out to say the very least. I spent the day crying, shaking, not eating, ignoring my two-year old, and basically taking care of business. It was awful. It was horrible. It was hell. Two days later, Friday, America World called to say it would be "wise" to postpone leaving Tuesday, April 3rd since they still had no idea when the paperwork would be completed at INS.
I just want to make something clear: America World is responsible for us not being able to board that plane tomorrow, April 3rd. America World is responsible for my sister having to cancel her flight from Boston to Nashville. America World is also responsible for my mother-in-law having to cancel her flight from Washington to Nashville. America World is responsible for overlooking the expired paperwork that made this whole mess. America World is the reason I will not be embracing my daughter on her first birthday, and the reason why she will continue to sit in the orphanage in Kazakhstan while we wait here for who knows how long until INS takes care of our paperwork.
Is anyone wondering why we hired America World? We sure are.
Today was Monday, and it was a very bad day. To make all the news of last week worse, America World fell silent today. No calls. No emails. Just silence. An hour before their offices in VA closed, I sent an email asking if they had any information regarding the INS paperwork, since I still needed to call our travel agent and rebook the flights to Kaz. Don't you just love how I have to constantly pursue them for information? ARGH!!!!! I received two emails back- one was from our coordinator who was out of the office Friday and Monday (nice) and the other was from her boss saying there is still no timeline for the INS paperwork. The thing that really torks me is that they didn't even bother to call or email on their own initiative to let me know anything today. I spent most of the day crying because I am MOURNING the fact that I won't get Emily this week. Do you think they get that? Nope. They didn't even bother to call or let me know anything. I am so discouraged I can't even think straight. I am so sick and tired of people not doing their jobs and then not owning up to not doing their jobs when they get busted. Makes for a very bad witness. Check out their website, awaa.org, so you can read all about how they help families so much.
The good news is that God is bigger than all of this. It's ironic that after all the struggle with the foreign government, the courts, and everything, that it's America World's mistake that is causing this present delay. But when God wants to accomplish His will in our lives, He does so DESPITE the obstacles. Emily is ours. Emily will come home.
It's late and I must put this day to rest. It has taken its toll on my soul.