Guinea Pigs

I'd love to tell you how well everything is going over here. Instead, we would covet your prayers as we struggle through this 10-day waiting period. This 10-day period not being waived is new to this region. We are quickly discovering that we are basically guinea pigs in this new experiment as the orphanage tries to figure out how to do this. What I'm speaking of is the grieving that a child needs to go through as they transition to their new family. Usually, in the past, a child would go through this phase in the hotel so the orphanage directors never saw it. Instead our daughter is going through this grieving in full view of the orphanage staff and they are not taking it well.

It's a long story of what has transpired over the past few days. They have asked us to try bribery with candy, ignoring her, giving her space--all kinds of different things and no matter how much we have disagreed, we have complied because the orphanage director still wears the pants until May 12th. However, today when they changed the plan without informing us and then decided that this was all too stressful for our daughter and they were going to medicate her, we came very upset. Unfortunately for us, we happened to have the translator this afternoon that is terrible at translating and she made our situation worse by causing miscommunication and more confusion.

After much discussion about the issues at hand with the orphanage staff, they returned our daughter to us who was in a "very happy mood" now. It was such an incredible switch that we are pretty sure they medicated her right under our nose.

We have been promised by our coordinator that he will go to the orphanage tomorrow and sort everything out for us and make it right. Please keep us in your prayers. We recognize that it is only 7 more days until this is over, but it sure feels like an eternity. Please pray for us to have wisdom to know what is best for our daughter and for all of those involved in the decision making--that we would all be on the same page and that any miscommunications would be cleared up.

1 Samuel 1:27 "I prayed for this child, and the LORD has granted me what I asked of him."