Someone is missing his grandma and grandpa.....

My mom and her husband went down south for a couple months this year and C'man has started to REALLY miss them. The other night he was in tears that they had gone away without him. So I offered to take him to the lake to be there when they get home......he is soooo excited. He was up first at 1:30 am and then at 6:30 asking if we could go to the lake to see grandma and grandpa yet! LOL! It's going to be a long day as we are not heading out till later this afternoon. First we need to get groceries and pick up the van from the shop and then we can go. He even want to take his skates, hockey net and sticks so that he can skate on the lake just like in his book. We have settled on skates and helmet and poor Winston has to stay home with dad!

8 Months ago......

8 months ago we saw your faces for the first time.
8 months ago we fell in love with those same faces.
Today we still dream of the day that we are able to be together forever.
8 months ago we thought it would not be much longer till we would get to hold you in our arms.
8 months later our hearts ache for you far more than one could ever imagine possible.
Today we are still fighting to bring you home.

Please know we are doing everything we can to be together!

Love you always!
mom

Big pile of nothing.....

So we got an update and our rep in E has the document in question but we still have NO answers! They hope to have a copy of the document emailed to them here in Canada by tomorrow! Why a whole week later?????? I am really ready to snap! I am so tired of never getting a straight answer from our agency that I could spit, scream, yell, UGH...you name it!
***Edited profanity out***
Deep breaths.....deep breaths.

I am however very happy to say that dear online adoption friends are finally getting to make the journey to meet their kids. We hit many bumps along the way but it is finally time that they get to go on ahead. Have a great trip you guys!

Some progress I think......

Could it be, could we actually be making baby steps?

Last night Nairobi CIC tried faxing us the documents we have been trying to get by any means possible since our agency did not bother keeping copies before they sent them to CIC. These documents are where the apparent date discrepancy is that is causing us such a delay. Well since no progress was being made by our agency I decided to stay up one night and try to get ahold of the inquiry line in Nairobi. Nairobi is 9 hrs ahead of us so for almost 3 hours I tried and tried and tried calling. I finally got someone who was willing (after a brief plea) to forward my call to a voice mail. I left our information advising them I was following up on an email I had sent a week earlier and low and behold that morning I awoke to an email from them. YAY! I actually expected our agency to lose it but since they have been making no progress they have decided that they could use all the help they can get. Normally one does not need to go to these extremes but when you are the 1st person in agency history to have the problems we have been having and the agency happens to drop the ball for an ENTIRE month all other rules go to the wind. We are hoping that tonight the full document will come through and not just the cover page.......

We also got word today that our rep in Ethiopia has a meeting tomorrow with the orphanage to get copies of the documents. Since the documents are in Oromo and Amharic they will take a couple days to be translated. They hope that we will have a copy by early next week. We are hoping that our rep is then able to start investigating and find out where exactly the error occurred and what needs to be done to correct it. We are we can get this information in and back to Nairobi sooner than later to avoid the ever dreaded DNA test. We are still trying to find out if our agency provides them with enough information in a satisfactory amount of time if they would proceed without the DNA test.

We are not wanting the DNA test as it is a very time consuming test that really will provide no relevant information.

So think positive thoughts and lets hope things start progressing in a much more timely fashion.

Will you do your part to help out?

Please support the call for better resourcing at the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi.

More information can be found at http://www.ccrweb.ca/documents/Nairobireport.pdf

"I believe it is important that we advocate this time for those whose voices are not as loud as our voices. If Nairobi is better resourced, which is what we are asking for, it could potentially benefit our Ethiopian children as well. Here are the simple steps that we can follow to take action on this issue":

1) Cut and paste the letter at the end of this post into an email.

2) Send the email to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, Jason Kenney, at Kenney.J@parl.gc.ca and Minister@cic.gc.ca

3) Copy your own Member of Parliament on the email. Using your postal code, you can find her/his email address here.

If you feel strongly about this issue, there are a couple of easy additional steps that you can take to help ensure our message gets heard:

4) At this time, the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration is actually studying the issue of immigration application process wait times. The long visa wait times of the High Commission in Nairobi in particular have recently been raised at Standing Committee hearings. Please copy the following Standing Committee members on the email to the Minister as well:
tilson.d@parl.gc.ca; BevilM@parl.gc.ca; chowo@parl.gc.ca; StcyrT@parl.gc.ca; Calandra.P@parl.gc.ca; GrewaN@parl.gc.ca; ThilaE@parl.gc.ca; karygj@parl.gc.ca; Wong.A@parl.gc.ca; DykstR@parl.gc.ca; Mendes.A@parl.gc.ca; Young.T@parl.gc.ca

5) Please call Minister Kenney’s office to ask CIC to act on the recommendations from the Canadian Council for Refugees report on the immigration application processing times at the High Commission in Nairobi. The Minister’s office can be reached by phone at 613-954-1064. This is a very quick and simple call to make. The person you speak to will simply note your comment, but all phone calls they receive are logged and the more calls the Minister’s Office receives on an issue, the more likely the issue will be viewed as a priority and addressed.

Here is the letter for copying and pasting / personalizing”:

Subject line: Application processing times at the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi

Dear Minister Kenney,

I am the parent/grandparent/friend of a child adopted from Ethiopia. I have read of the Canadian Council for Refugee’s report on the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi, which processed my child’s visa.

I am distressed to learn of the High Commission’s processing times for its most vulnerable applicants. I am embarrassed as a Canadian to read in the report some of the personal stories of refugees and their dependants who are enduring significant hardships, and in some cases tragedy, as they wait years for their applications to be reviewed by your clearly overburdened visa officers in Nairobi.

The Canadian Council for Refugees says that, “immigration officers working there are asked to do the impossible.” I could not agree more and want to lend my voice to encouraging the Government of Canada to stop the neglect of this overseas mission and the many very vulnerable individuals and families it serves.

CIC-Nairobi’s processing times for refugees and refugee dependants are approximately double the average for all of Canada’s overseas missions. In fact, CIC-Nairobi’s processing times for almost all other immigration categories lag dramatically behind the global average for Canada’s overseas missions. This situation is hardly fair or just, especially given that it impacts some of the most at-risk people Canada’s overseas missions serve.

I would like to strongly encourage Citizenship and Immigration Canada to act on the following recommendations from the Canadian Council for Refugee’s report:

- increase resources (both human and material) at Nairobi;
- increase processing targets allocated to Nairobi;
- reduce the number of countries served by Nairobi by using or creating other visa posts in the region to take on some of the burden of Nairobi; and
- review refugee and immigration programs to ensure that access is equitable and that Canadian anti-discrimination and anti-racism policies are fully respected.

Your spokesman’s recent comments regarding the High Commission’s processing times seem to indicate that the Government of Canada feels no sense of urgency to address this situation. While acknowledging that this region is beset with many special obstacles, Canada is clearly failing to meet these unique challenges with unique solutions. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that those with the power in Ottawa to address this situation simply do not care to make resourcing decisions that would better support and protect vulnerable families.

In closing, I urge you to extend our Canadian values of fairness and compassion to vulnerable waiting families and to search for solutions to the issues currently facing the High Commission in Nairobi.

Sincerely,

Your name
Your address

What to say........

This is just a big pile of crappity crap!



Maybe you know who could show them how it's done!

Welcome

Welcome to my blog where we are now in private mode and I know who is reading my thoughts and following our lives. I am sad that I have had to do this as I know many who did stop in now and again to see how we where doing will be detered from following our journey yet I think that in the situation we are in we need to. I want to be able to speak my feelings without being afraid of who is reading and who will get ahold of our information. I also want to be able to vent without it getting back to our agency. This is not the normal way an adoption ends up and we are apparently very unique and first timers at many things so it seems. I will write more about this later when I have it all straight in my head and hopefully more answers. We have been hoping for that for weeks/months now though!

Thank you everyone for continuing in our journey and I promise now that I will post more frequently and more information.

Donna