Anyway, the news from Haiti is that the nation is going to institute the Hague polices for adoptions and the rules for these adoptions will be published on 7/13. Herein lies the "bad news, good news".
The bad news is that the Hague in conjunction with UNICEF has historically made international adoptions far more difficult. There are very important reasons as to why this is so, such as combating child trafficking, but there are also very unfortunate ramifications, such as UNICEF's anti-adoption stance. There are many people and agencies that feel adoption in general is a bad idea and UNCIEF is one such agency. The feeling is that children born in Haiti, or wherever, should remain in Haiti (or wherever). I think we can rap our brains around that general concept, yet with 750,000 orphans in Haiti, and maybe a few thousand adoptions pending, it really seems adoption in the end will be a solution for Haiti, not a problem. One reason among many is the idea that adopted kids may one day return to Haiti with an education, and a myriad of ways to potentially help their nation. For Kim and I this may mean our hope to adopt more Haitians will become more difficult as several Hague nations are no longer adopting kids at all.
The very good news however is that we are being told every kid in the system, including Francesca, is not only grandfathered into the pre-Hague standards, but the desire for the Haitian government to get all of these kids thru the system quickly so Haiti can begin the transformation to the Hague standards. They have targeted 7/31 as the day they want all the kids out of IBESR, the first step, and then on to the step of getting Visa's.
If this governmental plan unfolds as we are being told, and that is a big IF, we theoretically can count on Francesca being here by the fall, this winter at the latest. If our contacts in the US government can help, who knows, maybe she will be here in August/September. The difficulty now is managing expectations!
We also continue to understand that there are several more hurdles, which for us is why, knowing God in in control, makes all of this far easier than it otherwise would or could be. Which reminds me, PLEASE KEEP PRAYING FOR US...we may be getting close!
