Looking Back: One Year Ago Today–Fighting the Good Fight

Wednesday, Oct. 20, 2010

(This update is mostly courtesy of an email I sent my mom.  It was another day with only a few words in my journal.  You can tell I was just pretty much pooped.  After a hospitalization and now trouble with the Embassy, it was not an easy road we were walking!)

My morning started with more phone calls to Diana.  I woke up thinking that perhaps she should have a US Representative or Senator helping, or at least she could be contacting the State Department to inform them of the usual process.

We sat around the guest house all day with the group’s cell phone waiting for a call from the Consul.  Hubby checked in with them a few times.  It was a fine line between staying diligent, but not annoying them to where they don’t want to help us.

Here’s what I emailed my mom that evening…

“So here's where we are with the Embassy...Hubby talked with the Consul a couple of times today and the final verdict is that there is no final verdict.  It's looking good, though.  She heard back from the legal team in the States and they told her that a Passport is much more than the little blue book you carry, but it is actually a collection of documents verifying someone's identity.  They said that if she feels there is enough other documentation showing his identity, that the switching of the names isn't an issue.  So that's good news.  Unfortunately, they did question the misspelling of his name.  The consul is working tonight trying to gather cases she can cite to them of other accepted misspellings.  She really feels like it's a phonetic thing and not a concern.  We finally do feel like we have an advocate there - she's been very helpful today.  She said that she'll be working on it tonight and that she has meetings in the morning,, but that we should call her after 10:00.

So please keep praying!!!!  We are close, but she did say too that we should have a contingency plan because we could encounter problems with this same issue at DGM and even possibly at the port of entry in the States. 

Hopefully we'll have actual good news tomorrow and not just potentially good news. : )”

The rest of the evening, our group spent time gathering all the donations everyone had brought.  (Our goal was to use as much of our checked baggage as possible for infant formula and clothing and supplies to donate to the orphanages.)  We had hundreds, if not thousands, of cans of formula.  It was a fun project, and even the kids enjoyed it.  It was helpful to us to get our minds off of the struggle over the Passport.

It was so cute to see the kids excited about it, too.  They were such good helpers!

It doesn’t look like a ton here, but these stack is at least four rows deep.

This is our whole group…a wonderful group of people!

After gathering everything in the guest house’s dining room, we used a human chain to move it all to David and Barb’s room to store.