In case you are reading...

You, with an insight into immigration and citizenship issues... You, who knows someone who knows something about our situation, I'm sending out a plea. A plea for information. A plea for our family and a few families like ours.

The adoptions are processing along nicely. We hope all will be official by late May. Beautiful. The issue, however is with the children's citizenship. We have talked to representatives in Homeland Security, USCIS (United States Citizen and Immigration Service), our adoption lawyer, and have had conference calls with multidisciplinary lawyers INCLUDING an immigration lawyer who is trying to find out as much information as he can for us. Today Patrick presented to the Kansas City USCIS office to talk to someone directly. He was told the children cannot travel out of the country right now and that the government has nothing in place to allow Haitian children that came to the U.S. after the earthquake to leave the country. It is unknown when such a travel document will be created. Boom. The sound of our hearts sinking.

Here is the information as we understand it. Normally with international adoptions, when children arrive to the US, they come in on a residency visa. When adoptions are finalized, citizenship is automatically granted. However, our children came in on I-94 Humanitarian Parole Visas--- a visa that has only been used one other time in US history and not in an orphan situation. Apparently here in lies the problem. For some reason, normal citizenship conversion is not possible under this type of visa. Nothing--according to the USCIS representative--has been put into place thus far to help with this process at present time. The USCIS officer told us frankly that the kids citizenship would likely take 2-3 years to process after which they could apply for passports. She said there was NO OTHER travel document that they qualify for. She was not willing to have any sort of extended conversation with Patrick. We are hoping she is not the final official word on our situation, but she is the first qualified face we've talked to who should have access to such information.

We keep praying for some loophole to be revealed. We have e-mails out to a contact in Washington and are waiting for any information an immigration lawyer might be able to find. We are in communication with other families in the same situation as we are-- previously living and working in Haiti, now in the US waiting for their children's adoptions to be finalized. If it were only that simple. We had no idea that our children wouldn't automatically become US citizens coinciding with the finalization with their adoption. It makes no logical sense in our minds that they wouldn't.

Patrick and I are reeling with this new information. We are struggling with feeling like our hopes and "plans" are spinning out of our control all over again. We both feel so passionately about our work in Haiti with CONASPEH, work that after only a year and a half started to feel like it was moving forward. We had gotten past the "awkward new kid" phase and were starting to see visions take shape, friendships formed, language developing, plans stretching forward. We both felt a part of a community that we weren't yet ready to say goodbye to. We had hoped that our children would grow up the first 4 influential years of their life in the country of their birth, learning Creole, and flourishing under the loving, positive, protective daycare of our dear friend Sylvia. We fight the idea that our experience and work in Port-au-Prince has to be truncated given the disaster and the situation our family now finds itself in. As hard as it is for some people to understand, more than anything we want to return. We want to return for our children, we want to return to stand in this critical time with our partners, we want to return with new energy to the jobs we have there and tackle projects with the new sense of urgency and purpose the current state of affairs in Haiti inspires.

I cannot explain the yearning in our hearts that has pulled our thoughts to Haiti every second we've been back in the States. To consider NOT returning soon is one of the most difficult things we've had to face in the last 4 months. There were days Patrick and I were convinced we were in this crazy lifestyle for the longterm, for life. We both pray that dream is only being put on hold. I think both of us hope that we can still continue to dedicate our lives to international living, learning and service with or without a forced hiatus.

We have a few more contacts we are pursuing. We are praying for some window to open.

So if you are reading this and have information that might help us muddle through the bureaucracy, we would be ever grateful. Help us make sense of the fact that soon our children will officially be OURS but not our country's. If not, we ask for prayers for our discernment in the waiting.