Adoption Process - Week 18 12/10/2004
Well, there’s good news and bad news this week.
First, the good news: Our dossier made it to Ukraine and into the hands of our facilitator!
The bad news: He says that the National Adoption Center in Kiev will not accept the criminal clearance letters because they are issued on County Supreme Court Letterhead rather than on STATE letterhead. Unfortunately, there are laws on the books in Arizona that prohibit anyone representing the State itself from issuing criminal records information even if asked to do so by the citizen. So even though the letters are completely official, contain the required language, “so and so is cleared AT THE STATE LEVEL in Arizona”, and are signed by a Judge, our facilitator says they will be rejected immediately.
The solution: We have to get another fingerprint clearance by the FBI, which covers ALL states, and submit that in conjunction with a letter from Arizona DPS explaining why the state cannot provide the information being requested and that the FBI clearance does provide the necessary information.
Hoop-jumping at its most spectacular.
Our consolation prize: Somehow, Cheri managed to track down some folks at the FBI processing center in Clarksburg, WV who told us how to indicate our need for urgency on our fingerprint processing request, and one of them called me a couple hours after receiving our request. What is normally a 4-6 week process should be reduced to just a few days.
…or so we’ve been told. I have no reason to think otherwise, but I’m learning the hard way not to get my heart set on particular dates or timelines. We’ll submit our dossier to the adoption center when we’re meant to, and we’ll pray that they don’t take issue with anything in it. Then we’ll pray through the next step in the process. One…slow…step…at…a…time.