A call to action

I have recently found out about the plight of a gal Daron and I met while fostering Adan in Guatemala. She is fostering her daughter and due to a problem with a signature on her birth mother's national ID card, her case has ground to a halt with no real end in sight. If you are in process or have adopted from Guatemala, please pass this letter along to your facilitator or agency. The more similar cases that band together, the stronger their case.

Dear [agency-name],

If your agency has a case in process that contains a Guatemala City cedula or birth-certificate that is missing the Civil Registry signature (usually the mayor's signature), we have important information to share.

According to PGN, if your case has not yet received a previo for the missing signature, it will. The letter from the Civil Registry and/or the Mayor of Guatemala City is no longer sufficient to satisfy the previo. The four PGN assessors have made a joint decision that these unsigned documents MUST be signed. However, at this time there is NO ONE in Guatemala City with the authority to sign these documents!

We are Cheri xxxxxx and Erin xxxxxx, in process of adopting Guatemalan babies through For This Child and HAPS, respectively. After many months working on this issue separately, our agencies are now collaborating to find a solution. They have discussed this with the PGN reviewers, Barrios, and the Mayor of GC directly. The conclusion is that the mayor does NOT have the authority to sign a document issued under another mayor's tenure. Therefore, we must file an acta with a different branch of PGN that will require the Civil Registry of GC to 1) designate and authorize a person to sign these documents, and 2) order that person to do so.

The PGN reviewer on Erin's case currently has 12 cases that have been kicked out for this reason. If all 8 reviewers have a similar number of cases, that means 80-100 cases are in this same predicament! We have been advised to find as many of these other cases as possible so that we can ALL file the acta together. We have strength in numbers.

If you have, or know of, a case that contains a Guatemala City cedula or birth-certificate that is missing the Civil Registry signature, please contact:

Karla Ordonez, with HAPS:
Guatemalan cell #5555-3610, office #2332-9040, karla6.ordonez@gmail.com

Traci Orr, with For This Child:
US #214-370-8436, traci@forthischild.org

Thank you for your time,

Cheri and Erin

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In Adan news, he has been standing up along the furniture and taking tentative steps to walk along said furniture in the last week. He has walked while holding onto our hands for quite some time, but hadn't shown much interest in really trying it for himself. I'm very excited, even with the knowledge that along with this new adventure will be the ability to reach even more stuff! The cats are going to have to move even higher to avoid his loving little 'pats' (or more aptly put, 'grabs').

Sorry for the lack of updates, but the three of us have been passing around one heck of a cold the last 3 weeks. Adan got it first and had a runny nose and low grade temp for a couple days. Two days later, I had it. Now we are at 3 weeks later and I am just now finally getting over it and Daron now is in the early stages. Unfortunately, my mom now also has it after visiting last weekend. Hopefully, we will be done with it soon!