Day late mail and Floods

Our agency has been wonderful to work with. They have completed a number of adoptions in Mexico Pre- Hague and have done all the requirements to meet the Hague Treaty regulations. Unfortunately, as they were ready to submit a dossier last year, the "Powers That Be" in the Mexican Central DIF decided to impose an additional approval process for all adoption agencies above and beyond what Hague requires- which they have the right to do.
So, since last summer, they have been jumping through hoops meeting all the requests for additional paperwork. One thing that was newly required was an international INTERPOL clearance- which basically is an international background check for the adoption agency.  Our agency has been waiting and waiting for this approval to come through and finally have heard that it did. At the end of April, all the paperwork was assembled for the DIF committee to review it and give the formal approval for dossiers to be submitted. BUT, the DIF committe only meets once a month. And the INTERPOL letter arrived one day late in the mail! GRrrrr... so now we are having to wait until May 20 in order for our agency's paperwork to be reviewed and approved. THEN, the agency's dossiers can be submitted. We hope. We all are just holding our breath and praying that they aren't going to ask for any new papers or delay giving the actual approval letter.  We would love to have all our prayer warriors bathe this committee meeting in prayer!

As for our process, our translations were done last week- just in time for the flooding to hit Nashville, Tennessee where our translator is! Many office buildings and roads were impassable or under water. This posed a dilemna since all our translations need to be notorized, authenticated and then apostilled. AND, to top it all off, our translator was flying out of town for a week long training. Guess where? An hour from my house! What are the odds!
We thought it would be a disaster, but then realized that it was a blessing! She could just sign and notarize them here in MD and I could get them authenticated and apostilled here in MD since the flooding was posing such an issue.
Only one problem- in her haste to catch her flight, our translator forgot the final copies of two of our translations and didn't have any way to get them to me in MD since she was here too! Thankfully, God was watching out for us, because after talking to our social worker from our agency, she said that all our documents needed to be authenticated in Tennessee, not MD. If she had not forgotten those two documents, we would have done ALL of them wrong and spend time and money having to redo all of them! Thank you Lord for keeping me from making a big mistake!
I was concerned that we would have to be delayed indefinitely until the TN government buildings were reopened- who knows when that would be! But, after  a few phone calls, I think all the buildings we need are either open or have opened at another site on higher and drier ground.  Our translator is going to make the rounds to all the places that give out pretty stickers (!) this week and then we should finally be ready to assemble our dossier and send it to our agency to submit! Then it's a whole other process- but that's another post for later!