A Bump in the Road

This morning I received a phone call from the judge (Juliet) who is assisting us in Uganda. It seems that the attorney who was hired on our behalf is not working out as well as we had hoped. While the judge is doing as much as she can, we still need an attorney to represent us in court. The judge can not do this for a couple of reasons. 1) She works up in Northern Uganda as a child welfare judge. It takes her about 6 hours by bus to get to Kampala, which is where the Embassy is located and all the court proceedings and filings take place. 2) As a judge, she can not represent us in court. This is not new information for us. We have known this from the beginning. While we knew she could not represent us, she has been very vital to our adoption. You may or may not know that while she was still a lawyer she represented Tracy's grandma (Gertrude), who at the time was seeking legal custody of Tracy. Gertrude was successful in gaining that guardianship, which in turns allows her to turn guardianship over to us. When we first began to discuss the hope of adopting Tracy, Gertrude immediately tracked down Juliet and asked her to assist us. Without her, it seems impossible that we would be where we are today. The fact that we need to hire a new atty. poses a few challenges, none of which can not be overcome. Truth be told, Jim and I have been frustrated by the lack of information our atty. was able to get (or not get) for us. He was selective about the questions he would respond to, and his communication with us was very minimal. Juliet has already spoken with another colleague who is willing to take on our case. He will be in Kampala tomorrow (Tuesday Oct. 21) and has all the necessary paperwork to take care of our first filing. If I understood Juliet correctly, he will send us an affidavit to sign and we will return that to him as soon as possible. By next Friday, he expects to have a court date for us. It will be necessary for Jim and I both to travel to Uganda for that court date. At that time, we will also need to file the additional application that will grant Tracy her visa. We are still waiting for an answer on how long this will take. The previous atty. never specifically addressed this question. We have asked for our new atty. to inquire about this tomorrow when he is in court. Juliet did say that one of us will need to return to Uganda when all of the paperwork is complete and then we can take Tracy home. Of course we are not excited about this at all. We will continue to pray that the document we need can be filed and finalized in the time frame that we are in Uganda for that final court appearance. We have no choice but to wait and see... So, to sum it up, we have 2 main prayer requests today. 1) Finances - Because we need to hire a new attorney, it will cost us a little more money. He is willing to work for less than the previous atty., but still it is more than we had expected. We also have one more installment left to send once the filings have taken place. The Lord has provided for all of our needs so far, and we continue to trust Him for the remaining finances. 2) Please pray that this new atty. will have our best interest in mind and that he will actually move forward with the court proceedings that he is capable of. Of course it goes without saying that we want this to happen as soon as possible. We'll keep you posted... Tanya

Documents Have Arrived

We got a call from Uganda Monday morning letting us know that all of our documents had arrived safely! The next step is for them to be filed in court. We'll keep you posted on when that will happen! Tanya