Documentation sent

As part of the adoption application process – we needed to get quite a few official documents together, including birth certificates, marriage certificate, medical reports, employment reports, police good behaviour certificates, plus copies of passports and such.

These documents were only considered valid for 12 months, so as a final part of the application process before we could travel, we had to get these all updated and sent across to Colombia.

The police good behaviour certificates required finger-print checks, and when we originally got these done in late 2007, it was a messy process with ink. It’s not just the tips of your fingers, it is also the whole finger, the palm, the sides of the hand and more – so your entire hand ends up covered in ink, and you have to scrub them clean afterwards.

This time at least, they had installed digital fingerprint scanners, which were quite a bit cleaner to use. It takes a few weeks to get the reports done – but we managed to collect them yesterday – after a few phone calls they agreed for me to drive to police headquarters in Parramatta to pick them up.

My passport was sent off last week and I paid extra for priority processing (48 hour turnaround), but of course that didn’t take Australia post into account, who seem to always take 2 days to deliver express post items, despite the supposed “guaranteed overnight delivery”! Fortunately it arrived today, so I rushed down to the post office to collect it, managed to find a photocopier at the local library (which was open at just the right time!), and was then able to put all the documentation together and express post it over to the adoption support agency so that they could arrange for everything to be translated and notorised before being sent to the orphanage.

So now that this has been sent, we just have to wait. We have been told to expect about 4 or 5 weeks wait before we get approval to travel, at which point we will need to get to Colombia pretty quickly – so we need to spend this time getting ready.

Given that we weren’t expecting to be allocated so soon, we haven’t actually bought anything like cots, prams, car seats yet – but we have at least been researching stuff, so we have a bit of an idea about what we want to get. It’s going to be a busy few weeks!