We Now Interrupt this Adoption for an Inconvenient Piece of Legislation

Get this: with 17 days left before we fly to Taiwan, we found that there is a chance we may not be able to take William out of the country if we don't meet the requirements of the Pennsylvania Interstate Compact.

Apparently, Pennsylvania and a few other states have a law that applies to adoptive families who haven't seen their child prior to the finalization of the adoption. The family's adoption agency must send in copies of several documents to the Interstate Compact office in Harrisburg, PA. Among them are a copy of the homestudy, the adoption decree, the original birth certificate, and the final birth certificate listing us as the parents.

You may ask yourself why we are finding out about this at such a late point. Good question. We are wondering the same thing ourselves. (Can you tell I'm just a little upset about this?) We had heard about some Interstate Compact thing from our friends at church, Rob and Mary, who are traveling to India in the next few weeks to pick up their son. They have been working on satisfying its requirements for their adoption over the past few weeks. However, we had naively assumed that because neither our homestudy agency nor our adoption agency had notified us about this that we were out of the clear. By divine intervention, I had contacted our homestudy agency to inquire about re-adoption procedures in Pennsylvania when the director asked me, "Oh, by the way, did you..."

So what does this mean for our family? Both our adoption agency and our homestudy agency representatives were painfully ambiguous in their responses to this question. (Hint: that is not the right answer for a family expecting to bring their child home in 17 days.) I decided to call the IC office in Harrisburg to find out for myself. Thankfully, the woman handling our case was both very friendly and knowledgeable. She explained that if our adoption agency pulls together all the paperwork and sends it to her office in time, she will send us a letter officially clearing us to bring William home. We would then take this letter with us to the AIT office in Taipei when we go to apply for his via to exit the country. Without it, we could be stuck in Taipei until the necessary paperwork comes together.

Our adoption agency has much of the paperwork on hand and ready to send, but there are a few documents that I've been warned we may have to get ourselves while at St. Lucy's. This is a chance I don't want to take. What if something goes awry and we don't get the papers while there?

Now it could be that the officer at AIT in Taipei has never heard of the Interstate Compact and won't even know to ask for our letter. After all, most families adopting from Taiwan have never had to abide by it. But I don't want to test out the scenario and find out the hard way.

I know that God has his hand in our adoption. This has been evidently clear to us in all the strange twists and turns our journey has taken. Perhaps this is a lesson in trusting him to see things through in the best possible way. However, trust is a tricky thing to render when our travel plans hinge upon other parties and their ability to push papers across state lines. But with our only recourse being to breathe down the necks of those parties to ensure they're following through, trust in God's power is the only worthwhile option. And in the end, isn't it the best?