Update on Flight Home

It is now 11:00 and we just returned from the embassy. They are still not sure if they can issue the visa today. They are processing the application and await our security clearance. We will know by 4:00 today. If they can do it, they will call us and we will take a taxi back to the embassy to get it. We should be okay on time since we don´t have to leave for our 11:30pm flight until 7:oopm. But we really need to start packing just in case.

So we were picked up this morning by taxi at 8am by a different orphanage contact, Annette (our usual contact is helping the last american family get passports today). Annette has lived in Bogota for 56 years!! But the funny thing about it is that she was born in East Germany and does not look at all Colombian. She was very nice and helped us through the embassy process. The American Embassy is a huge complex and when we were dropped off we saw another huuuuugggee line to the door. We walked right past everyone and walked right through since adoption visas take priority. You have to go through a big security clearance area...Jim had to stand in this big X-Ray machine thing with his hands up. I was allowed to walk through since I was holding the baby. The area to wait for your visa is a big open air plaza with cobblestone floors, very nice. We walked up to a window and presented our paperwork, then sat down for our names to be called. Then we went to another window and presented more paperwork and answered a few questions about the boy. The woman was behind a glass window and you had to pick up a phone and talk to her which was kind of weird. After that we went to another window and paid the visa fee and sat down to wait again. After a while we were called up again and told that our visa would be ready at 4 tomorrow. So Jim pleaded our case to the woman and told her that we were having difficulty getting a flight back to the US. She took our phone number and told us she would try to have it done today, but it all depended on the system, which at that moment was very slow.

So we´ll see! Check back to see what happens! I can´t take the suspense, can you??