WE GOT IT !!!

Well, it happened.....today we received the letter from the Minister officially approving this entire process. As far as the adoption is concerned, the process is OVER!!!! Yes, Casey and Corey, that means she is your little sister.

It did not come without some "moments" though. To summarize, our attorney dropped off the last documents at the Ministers office early this morning, and Laura, Gabriella, and I went there to wait for the final letter. The letter can take over 3 days to be written, however, we were told to just go to the office and sit there and wait for it to be completed. They were not pleased we were doing this, but our file did get worked on almost right away. The 'moment' came when we were told the Minister did not like one of the dates on a hand written court document. An incorrect date was initially put down and then crossed out and the correct date entered. It was not completely legible and they asked that we go back to the Sector Court and have the appropriate authority make is more legible and then 'stamp' it. Well, that took about 2 and a half hours, but it did get done, we went back to the Ministry. The Minister did sign the letter on the condition that we resolve the date issue. Once we got back to the Ministry, we had our letter within about 15 minutes. YEA!!!

Around 4:30 we took the letter and Gabriella back to the orphanage but we were allowed to bring her back to the hotel. The 3 of us will be together for the remainder of the trip and then the 5 of us will be together forever after that.

Tomorrow, we have 2 tasks to be able to take Gabriella out of Africa. We will go to the Office of Immigration and Migration at 7:00 AM to apply for Gabriella's Rwandan passport so she can leave the country. We are going to request expedited processing because new passports can take up to 5 days. If we are lucky we are hoping to get it in the afternoon. The 2nd task is to go to the US embassy to submit paperwork that allows us to get her visa once we go to Kenya....If that doesn't make sense, we are with you. Right now, when someone tells us to fill out a form, we fill out a form.

Stay tuned for more excitement tomorrow....