PGN Out Date - 2 years later

Two years ago today, I found out I was out of PGN. In the world of Guatemalan adoption, that was the biggest deal! PGN (Procuraduria General de la Nacion) was the attorney general/court system that Guatemalan adoptions had to go through. (I will talk about this in the past tense because the Guatemala adoption process is changing. Guatemala is currently shut down to the US for adoptions, and when/if it ever reopens the process will be different from what it was in the past).

Anyway, you could be in PGN for months, and kicked out for various reasons and then had to go in again and wait for more time. I was kicked out three times. Each time you had to redo a document and then be resubmitted. Depending on how long it took you to redo the document, get it notarized, authenticated, state certified, stamped by the Guatemalan Embassy in DC, translated to Spanish, and resubmitted, months or more could be added to your wait. Here is an example of a kick out reason: I was once kicked out because the person assigned my case said the police clearance letter was not in my file. The thing was: it was in the file! So I was kicked out just because they did not "see" the document that was in there! Some times the kick outs were for crazy things! And this is typical of the process at the time. This was one of the reasons I got so paranoid about my documents as I explained in this post.



March 13, 2007 I got the email stating that I was out of PGN. My adoption was out of court. There were a few more steps before it was final. (For example: The birth mom had to sign off for the final time. In Guatemala, the birth moms had to sign off on the process 4 times, and could change their mind up until the last time!) But the PGN out was most important because that was what was holding up the whole process and that was the step that could be 4 months for some people and years for others. After your PGN out, everything else happened in a more step by step order.

I have to say that I did lose faith during my long wait. At one point, my agency had assured me that Maya would be home before Christmas (something they had no way of knowing, I realized later). That fact was what got me through a lot of the wait. Once it was clear that was not going to happen, and then January, February, her first birthday, March started to go by, I started to worry it was never going to happen. Buzz on the Internet was that Guatemala was close to closing to adoptions and who knows what would happened to people in the process. You can believe that the email telling me I was out, was the best email I ever got! I jumped around the room, cried, said prayers of thanks, and blared Richard Smallwood's song "Thank You" so loud I am sure the neighbors had to have heard. Below is this incredible praise song. It is perfect for moments in life when your heart is just so full of thanks there is no better way than to express it through song (and loudly too) It's also inspirational for every morning. I'm thankful each day that I was given the gift of my beautiful daughter! All those parents out there know what I am talking about, especially those touched by the incredible gift of adoption!

The song is divided into two parts. This video is from You Tube. I am not the videographer, and I have no connection to the person who posted it.

Anniversary

February 28 is the two year anniversary of the day I turned in my dossier to adopt my beautiful girl. In the adoption world, a dossier is a packet of papers that you must compile in order to begin the adoption process. This includes things like inspections of your home, driver's records, physician reports, social worker reports, recommendations, birth certificates, marriage certificates, water inspections, fire inspections, fingerprint clearances... This list goes on and on and on. For each country this list varies, but it is a long list of very specific paperwork you must compile.

For a Guatemala adoption, each piece of required paperwork also had to be notarized and then authenticated at the county it was created in, then taken to the state house and certified that the notary is a certified notary, and then sent to the Guatemalan Embassy in Washington D.C. for their seal. Let me say again, this had to be done for each document. So say, you were born in another state (I was) you would have to get a notarized copy of your birth certificate and then send it to that state's state house for certification and then get it back to send to the Guatemalan Embassy. And say, your documents are notarized in more than one county in your state (mine were), you then have to go to each of those county land offices to get your document authenticated before taking it to the state house. And say, when you take your documents to the state house, that some thing is wrong with a document (that happened too) so you have to do it over again. And for one more example, say the adoption is taking longer than the federal government gives you for how long your fingerprint documentation is good, so you have to go to the federal building in your state and have you finger prints taken again. If you look at all of these instances, you get a glimpse of what it is like to compile a dossier. (Oh yeah, and each of these steps of the way you are charged for these services.)

In Guatemala, we were also told that the government is extremely nit picking when it comes to making sure the papers are not bent, that the dates on everything matched up, that things were only in black ink, and that list went on and on. So it was really hard to hand these papers to people like the county land office staff, who do their jobs just fine, but don't realize that their fingerprints or smudges or bending of the pages mean that effects my adoption timeline if Guatemala rejects that paper and it has to be redone. As a non-detail oriented person, this process forced me into paying very close attention to the details. I had each document in a plastic sleeve in a big binder and when I turned it in and the adoption staff member took each document out to check it to make sure it was complete, I literally cringed as I watched her handle each of my documents. It was like those documents were my baby. When people say they are "paper pregnant" now you have more of an idea of what they mean.

So on this day, after 6 months of paper chasing, I submitted my dossier and started the wait for my child. Little did I know then , that I'd have to wait until May before I got my referral (which means matched with a baby) and got to see her beautiful face for the first time. And I didn't know then that it wouldn't be until the following May that I'd get to bring her home.