Day 29: An Unexpected Blessing

Finally, the sun is back!  It was beautiful today!  We didn't have much planned for today.  This morning we got up and lazed around the guest house.  Nicolas did some drawings, played with his cars, and then we all went out and played soccer and ran around.  Then, we came in and got ready before lunch.  We had a skype date at 1PM, so we headed over to the Oasis office so that we would have a faster internet connection.  Right after we started our skype, we received a very unexpected text message - Nicolas' new ID number and birth certificate were done already!!  Petra (our social worker) asked us to meet her at Home Affairs ASAP to move to Stage 2!!!  Praise God!!!  We experienced some technical difficulties with skype as well, so unfortunately we didn't get much time to talk.

The Oasis office is quite close to Home Affairs, so we were able to get there quickly.  We waited for Petra to arrive (she had to come from much further away) and we submitted the forms for Nicolas' unabridged birth certificate.  We were blessed once again today in that we did not have to wait too long in line to get our paperwork processed.  We were also able to work with the same man (whose name is Gift - fitting as he was a gift to us!) that helped us yesterday.  The abridged birth certificate we received today only has his name, date and place of birth.  The unabridged certificate will be much more like ours in the US, listing details of parents and such.  Once we had the abridged certificate  we went to the passport office to apply for his temporary and permanent South African passports.  That process was a bit jumbled in comparison, but nothing we couldn't handle.  Filling out the paperwork was quite simple, but when it was my turn, the woman looked at me like I was nuts.  Turned out she hadn't done a passport for an adoption before, so she didn't know what paperwork she needed.  She took some documents and disappeared for 5 or 10 minutes.  Then, we told her we needed both temp and permanent passports, but she only processed us for the permanent one.  When we went to the cashier (a different person), we explained that we needed both due to time constraints and needing the temp passport for our consulate appt, she explained that we had to go back to the other lady.  So, we waited for her and she informed me that I had to fill out another form for the temp one.  Ok......so I filled out the next form and by that time the lady who had been helping us had disappeared.  So......we waited a little more.  A different person helped us with the second application.  We paid for that one and then headed back to have his photo taken.  They looked at the papers and told me the temp passport application needed to go back to the people who sent us to her.  What??? LOL.  Ok.  So, I took it back to the woman at the cashier desk who told me to take it there.  Confused yet?? :)  Then she told me we could come back between 8:30AM and 2PM tomorrow to pick up the temp passport. which is awesome!!  I have no idea when they are going to process it since we turned it in about 30 minutes before they closed, but I hope she was right!  We will be heading back over there tomorrow morning to pick it up.  Please pray it will be ready!

Petra was texting our updates to Ruth (who is back in Capetown now - about a 12 hour drive away) and Ruth confirmed that they will be able to schedule our US consulate appointment as soon as we have the temp passport!!  So, things are going more smoothly that we ever could have imagined!!!  Thank you so much for all your prayers - they are powerful!!

Not as exciting, we headed to the rental car place after we left Home Affairs because we have to renew our rental.  You can only rent for 30 days at a time.  Of course, they told us we cannot renew it until the day it expires, which is Friday.  So.....we will go back again on Friday.

We decided to eat out for dinner as we had planned to go to the grocery store this afternoon.  We went to Luigis (bet you wouldn't guess it was Italian).  This was the restaurant Beth and Bev took us to on our first night in Joburg.  We had also come one other time when our internet was out for dessert.  What are the chances that we would have the same waiter all three times, and even better that he would remember us.  We had a great dinner and celebrated being one step closer to coming home!  After dinner, we headed back to the guest house for homework, ice cream, and a movie.

Here are some more pictures!!  The first couple are from yesterday and the rest are from today:

Kevin and Nicolas' palm frond fight by the pool.

Nicolas and Kevin reading 'The Story' as part of Nicolas' homework.

This is right after we received his new birth certificate as Nicolas Wandile Longstreet!

And with Dad!

It seems like things are going so quickly now!!  We are racking our brains trying to think of all the things we want to do before we go home!  The time has flown by so far, and it's only going to start going quicker!  Hopefully, tomorrow we will have his temp passport and we will be praying for a US Consulate appointment early next week.  We'll keep you posted!

The Longstreets