A Nepali Christmas?

With Nepal being a country far from Christianity, they obviously do not celebrate our Christmas. But in honor of our daughter we enjoyed a few Nepali foods on Christmas Eve as a way to celebrate with her.

After our finger printing trip on Tuesday, we stopped off at an Indian Market in Omaha and picked up a few specialty ingredients I would need to finish my Nepali dinner. The menu included:

Momos (top left): A meat dumpling native to the Himalayas

Pulau (top right): A simple rice dish with spices, cashews and golden raisins
Dal Bhat (bottom): A lentil soup and rice dish that is a very typical meal in Nepal

Everything was really very good and I'd like to try different recipes in the future. Our favorite was probably the Momo! Everything should have been a bit spicier, but I kept the Scoville units low so the kids could palate them. Poor E still did not enjoy the meal. I forsee us travelling with at least 3 jars of peanut butter to Nepal next year just for him!

We followed our dinner with Christmas cookies and the exchanging of gifts. I look at my mantle now and hope and pray that there will be a stocking hanging full of gifts and a beautiful brown eyed girl running downstairs to open them next year!

Merry Christmas, sweet girl! May you be celebrating here with us in your forever home next year and may you know the immeasurable blessings of our Savior, born in a manger, who came just for you!

A Quick Trip to Omaha

We completed the last hurdle in our paperwork relay today as we drove to Omaha to be finger printed by the USCIS at Homeland Security. The weather could have delayed us, but the expected winter storm #2 has not hit yet. Jay took the afternoon off and we took the boys with us. It was a quick errand. The staff was very nice and got us in and out quickly -- probably 15 minutes. With Christmas this week, I do not expect to receive the final form for our dossier any time soon. But I hope it will arrive early in the New Year.

Once we receive this final form, we make a copy for ourselves and send the original to our agency along with our check for the Completion of Documents Fee. We are creeping towards that $4000 total. If you find yourself able to help our cause during this season of giving, we’d be forever grateful! If you’d like to give but don’t know how, just get in touch with us here, on Facebook or give us a call or send an email and we’ll fill you in.

Stay Tuned: On Christmas Eve I will be cooking 3 Nepali dishes in honor of our daughter. Log in later this week for pictures and critiques! Merry Christmas, friends!

Snow Day

"Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."

We've all heard that statement before. It does not apply here to our adoption. The blizzard that hit us last week not only closed schools for 3 consecutive days, but it also closed down the Omaha USCIS office on Wednesday the 9th and we were not finger printed for our 1 and final form for our dossier. Supposedly, we will be rescheduled for this appointment. How and when we will hear of that news is unknown. We'd appreciate your prayers for a quick rescheduled appointment!

Nepal is still not moving forward on adoption processing, as far as we know. Yet, we are hopeful and pray for our little Nepali girl.

In the meantime, we are ready for Christmas. The holiday parties are behind us. The shopping is done. Gifts are wrapped and under the tree. I just have to mail my Christmas cards and I hope to get those out in the next couple of days. Now to enjoy the remaining days of December doing a little holiday baking and relaxing.

Thank You!

Dear Anonymous Donor,

Jay found your financial gift on his desk this morning. What a way to start the day! We will never know who left the envelope, but we are forever grateful for you. Thank you for helping us bring our daughter home from Nepal! May you be blessed beyond measure for seeking Him and for living out Psalms 82:3. We can hardly wait to share this part of the story with our little girl!

With All our Love and Thanks,
Brooke & Jay

Good News! Bad News.

After last week’s rather melancholy tone, we were absolutely shocked to receive 2 envelopes in Saturday’s mail from Homeland Security. We have our fingerprint appointment on December 9! What could have taken 12 weeks “seems” to be moving right along. Of course, once we are fingerprinted, no one knows how long it will take the government to process them and issue this 1 final form we are waiting for. For some, this has only taken 2 weeks. For others, this has been the hold-up. But we are once again hopeful that perhaps we can actually be done with all of our paperwork before the close of 2009 as originally planned. WOW!

Things in Nepal right now have halted, unfortunately. We received an email from our agency this week stating “internal conflicts” within the Ministry of Women and Children. I forwarded our email to friends adopting through a different agency. Their agency says that there has been further corruption in Nepal within the adoption program on behalf of some European and some American adoption agencies. When these issues can be solved is not ours to say. But things have come to a halt. No children are being matched and no travel dates are being issued for those who have already been matched to their children! Please pray, on behalf of the waiting Nepali children and their waiting forever families, that the Ministry in Nepal would be able to weed out the corruption and resume issuing referrals and travel dates in a respectable, honorable, above-reproach manner.

12 Weeks Left?

This morning I received a very nice wall post on Facebook from a friend looking for an adoption update. Yes, it's been a while. Sorry for that! As I was typing my reply, I received an update directly from our agency.

Our final homestudy was just sent to USCIS yesterday. It was in my head that it had been sent 2 weeks ago when we received our official copy of the home study. But alas, it is still in the mail to DC. And much to my disappointment, we have been informed that it may take up to 12 weeks to be processed, approved and for us to receive that final document we need for our dossier. For those of you looking at your calendars, that would put us back to early February! Oh my! We had hoped to send our complete dossier to Nepal after the first of the year. And now it looks like we could be 2+ months later than hoped.

On the positive side, it does give us more time to fundraise. Gifts have been slow going lately but we're confident that our God will provide.

Please pray that we could receive our approval and final document, as well as the last $2800 we need for our dossier to be finished. And I'm praying to have it before the end of the year, but I know that it's all in His timing, not mine. But "He is able, more than able, to do much more than I could ever dream!"

Updates on the unrest in Nepal? I'm not sure. It's been a busy couple of weeks in our household and I haven't been to the Nepali news websites in a while. Any other adoptive families out there following the news?

Blessings to you all! More updates as they become available, but I guess it might be quite a while before we hear anything (sigh).

Unrest in Nepal

Things don't sound great in Nepal right now. There has been much protesting by the Maoist Party and threatening to blockade the entire Kathmandu Valley. Visit www.ekantipur.com for details on what is happening in detail.

This does not bode well for those of us adopting from Nepal, but we pray for a peaceful end to these protests. And in the midst of this, we receive an email from our case worker at our agency:

Dear Friends,

We have received several inquires about the activities recently happening in Nepal. As many of you have read on online newspapers and Nepal Adoption blogs, the Maoist political party has taken to the streets again, for what they call “peaceful” protests. When these types of events happen it is common that the government offices will close down for the day, and this has happened during this time as well. These activities have been happening over the last week. We understand that this is not the news from Nepal you would like to hear, but we strongly believe that the protests are not an indication that the adoption process will come to a halt or be affected in any negative way.

Many agencies in the US are currently awaiting referrals. We have hopeful that we will receive our first referrals by mid November for two families whose dossiers were submitted to the Ministry in the Spring.

Louise

So, please join us in praying for peace in Nepal and that the Nepali children can come home to their forever families across the globe!

In personal adoption news, our certified, notarized, official home study is here, actually in my possession! Three additional copies are on their way to our agency for our dossier and one more copy for the USCIS. That means we should be expecting our invitation to Omaha for our fingerprints. How long will this take? We don't know. For friends of ours, this process delayed their dossier and set them back on their agency's list. But once our fingerprints are processed, we will receive the 1 final piece of documentation for our dossier. We'll be done! Then the real waiting begins.