Keep pushing forward

After a weekend of tears and prayer, we felt a sense of peace to appeal this decision. God walked with us. He brought us this far and brought Juan David and Viviana this close to having a family again. Satan worked here, once again attacking us, stealing our joy, trying to destroy our family and our faith.

By the time we talked with our agency’s director again, we had a plan ready to set in motion. I must admit she seemed helpless at this point and did not communicate well with us. I will always have suspicions that our own agency let us down in some way, but I also possessed a strong enough faith to know God was bigger than an agency.

This situation held a purpose. He allowed it to happen, even if we didn’t understand why. We claimed confidence over a happy ending, one bringing Him even more glory than completing the adoption in the timing we hoped.

With another new school year ready to begin, I found myself bombarded with adoption paper work all over again. To start, we wrote an appeal, a four­-page letter in Spanish explaining ourselves, also pointing out at least one mistranslation we knew about. We poured out our hearts, restating our firm commitment to these two children.

One of my bilingual teammates proofread and edited the letter for me, and then a Colombian coworker looked over it again after that. We also gathered more documentation, including a rebuttal letter from our psychologist and a new letter from our social worker restating her complete approval of us. We requested letters from family and close friends, as well, who could prove our sociability in contrast to the socially withdrawn people described in that denial letter. Our agency agreed to attach a letter, too.

I finally received the official letter from Colombia, so I immediately glanced at the Spanish letter, not the translation my agency sent with it. I wanted to read how the person stated all those comments in Spanish. Then I compared translations.

One particular sentence in the letter stated that I feared Juan David would likely wander the streets in search of food. What? I never said that! Why in the world would I ever say such a thing? Where did that come from? Of course they thought I had misconceived ideas about adoptive children if they thought I said something crazy like that! Something must have gone terribly wrong in the translation of our documents.

I scanned through our copy of the psychological evaluation looking for anything written even close to such an idea. In the paragraph addressing our fears of adoption, our psychologist quoted our agreement over the challenge of raising a teenager. Our realm of parenting experience only prepared us for a seven-year-old. We’d always been careful about what we exposed our seven-year-old to or gave him the freedom to do, still not even allowing him to cross a street without holding someone’s hand. Juan David, on the other hand, roamed the streets alone as a child before the orphanage took him in. Those streets exposed him to things our own son didn’t even know existed.

We took the risk of bringing Juan David’s history into our home with great faith. Even so, we verbally acknowledged the risk. So our psychologist quoted me saying, “He’s likely to be more ‘streetwise’ than our biological son.”

I don’t know if I chose the best word to use in that conversation, but I knew the context and our psychologist understood. However, the person who translated the documents obviously didn’t understand that context because that’s where he said I believed Juan David would likely search the streets for his food. Our appeal would certainly address the fact that we felt, or better yet, knew, errors existed in the translation.

bizior photography – www.bizior.com

When I talked with our psychologist, he couldn’t believe everything stated in that denial letter! He assured me none of it reflected what he personally said about us. As he read the letter, he shook his head, saying, “Wow. This is like a slap in the face. They took everything I said completely out of context.”

He willingly wrote a new letter, rebutting the statements made against us and restating his approval of us. He chose his words even more carefully this time due to the translation factor.

The only statement in the denial that came from our home study regarded our son’s nervousness to share his room. Our social worker wrote a new letter for us, once again giving her approval of us. She described all the steps we’d taken to prepare our son for the arrival of his new siblings as a way to address his concern over sharing a room.

My faith and hope built up again. I knew we could prove every single statement in that denial letter as inaccurate or misinterpreted information. While preparing our appeal, letters from family and friends poured in. Along with letters from our psychologist and social worker, our appeal now contained multiple personal letters stating beautiful things about our family. 

http://hermagazine.ca/renewing-the-lost-art-of-letter-writing/