Bureaucratic Progress

Thank you to everyone who leveraged your networks and explored your degrees-of-separation to help us connect with our legislators (details posted below as "Home ... and Another Delay").

The situation was that shortly after returning home from our first trip last week, we received word that a key document allowing us to bring Syevinch back into the U.S. had expired — a casualty of an exorbitantly long adoption process. The application needed to be resubmitted to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with supporting, notarized documentation. The problem was that the quoted time for processing this particular form was 60–90 days. Now that things were moving forward in Russia (a court date was scheduled for us for October 25, which we had to postpone) and Syevinch was technically ready to be handed over to our custody, this delay was yet another hurdle to our progress (and sanity). In response to this, it was recommended that we contact our legislators to seek high-visibility assistance in moving our application through the bureaucratic process on a shorter timeframe.

At the same time that I sent out the plea for assistance to some of you earlier this week , Renee was hearing from our adoption agency, recommending that we hold off on calling in the "big guns" until we see what sort of response we might get from DHS directly.

As it turns out, we got confirmation from the individual responsible for adoption processing in the San Jose office of DHS just yesterday that they will rush our application through within two weeks. (Looks like the pictures we included of Syevinch might have worked at tugging some heartstrings after all!) We have a call in to our agency now to see whether we might be able to move forward in scheduling the Moscow court date for the week of November 12 — two weeks after the anticipated approval from DHS in order to provide enough cushion (we hope) to prevent yet another rescheduling.

So, again, thank you to everyone who responded with connections. I was a bit surprised to learn that I am only two degrees separated from Representative Mike Honda and three from Senators Feinstein and Boxer! It was nice to know that we could utilize those connections if we had to, but even nicer to know that we didn't have to.

Appreciatively,
Larry & Renee