One Week

We're down to the final countdown...

This is the message we sent out tonight to our family and friends:

Hello to all our family and friends,
We wanted to give everyone an update on our adoption process. As you’re aware, we lost the children that we were adopting from Haiti earlier this year when their birth mother reclaimed them from the orphanage. We’ve since started the process over again and we will be leaving next Sunday to go to Haiti to meet the little boy in these pictures.
His name is Malot (pronounced ‘mah-low’) and we know he’s somewhere between 3 and 4 years of age. (Apparently they actually don’t know when his birthday is, so that will be something fun we get to sort out at a future date.) As you can see from the pictures he has a fabulous smile and beautiful eyes. We’re nervous, excited and scared to meet him and we’re praying that things work out this time.
Many have asked what happens on our trip to Haiti. We’ll travel from Salt Lake to Miami next Sunday and then from Miami to Port-au-Prince the next morning. We’ll go to the orphanage and meet Malot on Monday. We’ll spend a few hours there at the orphanage with him so he can get used to us a bit before we take him back to the hotel with us. Then we get to “play house” for the next week at the hotel. He’s all ours until Friday evening when we have to take him back and leave him in the orphanage.
Haiti isn’t a particularly safe country, so we will spend nearly all our time at the hotel. There are armed guards there, so the building itself is pretty safe. They have a pool and there’s actually air conditioning in our room, which is a rarity in Haiti. We’ll eat all our meals at the little restaurant in the hotel. It should be an interesting week watching us try to communicate with an active 3 year-old who only speaks Haitian Creole!
We have a very small group going this time (only 4 of us) so we didn’t gather supplies for the orphanage like we did last time. There just isn’t that much space.
Malot is supposed to be essentially a child of the State, as his birth parents have abandoned him. We hope to find out more about the status of our paperwork and get a better idea of when we’ll be able to bring him home during this trip.