Dossier in Honduras!

Yesterday I received an e-mail from Gladney, saying that our dossier arrived safely in Honduras and is the hands of the attorney, Cesar. I guess he will have it translated into Spanish and have it authenticated by the Honduran government. Then, once presented to INHFA, it will take another couple of months to be approved. I hope they will not ask for more information or updated documents. Once approved, we will be officially on the waiting list for Samuel. I am thinking of a middle name for him. The name that comes to my mind these days is my uncle's name Paul.

The name Samuel came to me during the little show that my daughter did after Vacation Bible School at our church. They were talking about the story of Hannah. I'd forgotten about Hannah's story. She wanted a baby very much, but she could not have one. She prayed to God for a baby and became pregnant. She named the baby Samuel, which means "God heard" or "requested of God" or "God's heart". Hannah gave Samuel to the temple, where he became an important prophet. Alejandro and I agreed that this is a perfect name for our future son, because of everything that has happened in our lives the last 8 years. Our Samuel will grow up in our wonderful church. Our church is the only reason we are able to adopt again, thanks to some wonderfully generous people. Our son will be a gift from God. The name Samuel also sounds really nice in Spanish!

First post!

For those of you who don't know me, my name is Melissa Montes. I have been married for 15 years to Alejandro, who is from Spain. We have 1 daughter who we adopted from Vietnam in 2007. She is now 4 years old and a blessing. We are so privileged to be her parents.

We also are parents of an angel baby, who was born still in February of 2011.

We are fortunate to be able to begin a second adoption, this time from Honduras. We were originally considering a domestic adoption, but decided against it for many reasons. We began the adoption process in the Ethiopia program last October. Around the time our dossier was almost complete, except for our Immigration approval letter (the 171H) The U.S. Department of State issued a warning of major delays in the Ethiopia program, because of corruption in-country. Since we saw this happen in Vietnam, after we adopted our daughter, we decided to change countries. There are still 16 legitimate orphans in Vietnam who are matched with U.S. families who cannot come home, caught in the middle of bureacratic limbo for the last 3 years, which was when the country closed to U.S. adoptions. We were one of the lucky ones.

When the news was announced about the Ethiopia program, our agency announced they were starting a pilot program in Honduras. We decided that would be perfect for us, especially
because we both speak Spanish and Tegucigalpa is just a 3 hour flight from Atlanta. I am a Flight Attendant for Delta, and we have daily flights. there.

Honduras requires many other documents for the dossier than we had for Ethiopia, so we had to do a lot of the paperwork over. We had to update our Home Study and send it to USCIS again, along with a change of country request. A 2-hour personality test is also required. It took a few months to get all of this together. We just received our USCIS approval letter last week. We had been waiting since March 9th.

Now that all the paperwork is done on my part (I hope!) I have decided to start this blog. My agency says once the dossier is submitted, it will need to be translated and accepted by INHFA (in Honduras), who will accept it or ask for more information. Once we are accepted by INHFA, we will wait 6-12 months to be matched. We are requesting a boy up to 18 months at the time of referral. Honduras requires 2 trips with a few months in between. By the time the baby comes home, he could be 1 year or 2 years old.

We are very excited, but ready for a long wait and perhaps more paperwork and interviews, etc. The baby's name will be Samuel, but that is another post in itself....