Friday, October 9, 2009

The Conleigh Saga

In September, Conleigh's filed marked one year of sitting in the Haitian social service office, waiting for them to approve us as adoptive parents. Apparently, it is been held because we are 31 which is too young to adopt from Haiti based on their antiquated law which was written in 1974. If you've been following our story, you know the details of all of this so I'll spare you writing it all down again. (If you're curious, just click on the adoption topic under my topics group.)

We have been pressing for more details since April or so and have gotten several answers from our director asking for more information or updating us on what the processor was trying to accomplish. This week, our orphanage director informed us that our file has been sent for Presidential Dispensation. This means the president of Haiti will approve our adoption and once we have this approval we should be able to exit the office we are in. (Unfortunately, due to the chaos with the law, this is not an oddity.) I had been asking about this possibility for several months now so I'm thankful that we are perhaps headed in a direction that will get our file released. I don't know when our file was submitted to the president's office; I'm hoping that it's been there for a while now. As to the time frame for getting signed out of the president's office, that seems to be anybody's guess. I've asked around and have heard anywhere from two months to nine months. (Neither of which sound very appealing after being in IB*SR for so long already but there's not much I can do about it. At least our file isn't sitting in the same pile it's probably been sitting in.)

3 comments:

Tracy said...

If it makes you feel any better (I know it doesn't) I have no idea if we have dispensation yet or not. We are 35 and married 11 years...so not sure what our problem is either. This sure is frustrating. We entered IBESR back when you did, and we have no clue what our hold up is either. So depressing.

Katy said...

How strange that they waited so long to send it for dispensation, but then again, I don't even know when or if mine was sent for sure. Our O only tells us when we get OUT of IBESR, not dispensation. HUGS! This is such a hard wait.

kayder1996 said...

Katy,
I honestly don't know how long ago our stuff was sent off. I started asking and pushing a bit in April when we were in past 7 months. From that point until now, I asked about Presidential Dispensation both from our orphanage director and on the Haitian Angels groups as I was afraid that if our file needed that, that it was just sitting at IBESR and not being moved through. Our orphanage director (who is not the processor) said that presidential dispensation was only supposed to be for people with bio kids. But then she emailed me this last time saying it had been sent but still saying she thought it was only for bio kids. I've asked them for a date as to when it was sent and also asked someone in IBESR to verify information for me hoping that they might provide a date as well. But I haven't heard back from either one of them yet. It is utterly depressing and in our case such a monkey wrench we never expected. I have yet to find anyone in the same situation as us who have previously adopted but are having trouble with IBESR now. I also think that a lot of people think that it's just people with bio kids who are having issues with IBESR. Not much is being said about those people who are not 35. I wish someone would add an age column to those IBESR release pages because I'd really like to know if anyone under 35 is getting out. I asked this on Haitian Angels but only got 3 replies, two of which were people who had spouses who were over 35. The lack of information is a bit frustrating.