Our long-awaited 171H letter has arrived from the Dept. of Homeland Security! It was so beautiful, it made me tear up a little. It was a little like looking at your baby on an ultrasound for the first time... an affirmation that this really is happening and you're making progress towards meeting your child!
This is a "guard-it-with-your-life" piece of paper, and since you probably don't know what a 171H is all about or what we went through to get it, I shall honor it with a biography....
If you want to adopt internationally, you first have to deal with the Department of Homeland Security and the USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services). You have to submit an application called I-600A, to declare a foreign orphan as an immediate relative. Ukraine requires us to have this preapproval before we can even submit our completed dossier to the Ukrainian State Department of Adoption, and the preapproval is the first step in getting an immigrant visa for each child at the US embassy in Kiev.
Just getting to submit the I-600A application was a long process. We hit the ground running with the adoption on September 24, 2012. First we had to complete all our applications, request documents (like birth & marriage certificates), have background checks, write essay questions, and get reference letters... all this was just to get our feet inside the door at the adoption agency and home study agency!!! It took us about a month to do all of this. Then we completed more paperwork to get the home study started, which we began on October 29th. The completed home study arrived in our hands after Thanksgiving. This was all unbelievably fast.
Once we had the home study, we were able to submit a copy of it with the I-600A application, along with more copies of birth certificates and our marriage certificate. After about 5 weeks, we had our appointment with the USCIS office in Durham for fingerprinting. It was a humbling experience to walk into the Citizenship & Immigration office, the center of activity for all who want the privilege of becoming an American citizen, a privilege that I was born with and often take for granted.
I guess they decided we're good people, because our 171H approval letter arrived a very short 11 days later.
So what's next?
This 171H approval letter becomes an important part of our dossier - a dossier is the package of documents that you submit to the country - but there are a lot of other components to the dossier that we have been busy preparing! Thankfully, our adoption agency helped us to prepare many of these documents, because they have to be flawless. They included our petition to adopt, affidavits, letters of commitment, various powers of attorney, income statements, home ownership documents, medical documents, (more) criminal clearances, etc. All of these things have to be court-issued or notarized. Then we have to send them to the Secretary of State's office to be authenticated, which means that the state is verifying that our notary and the court officials are authorized to notarize or issue our documents.
It's been a little over 4 months since we began this journey, and it seems like a long time to spend on "just paperwork." It's hard to make the average person who's never adopted understand just how much was involved, but when I think about it, I can hardly believe we've come so far so fast! God has truly blessed us and we know without a doubt that His hand is in this!
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