Friday, April 17, 2015

Fingerprints done!

We completed our fingerprints (again) for the federal database at USCIS in Salt Lake City today.  Now they just have to process them and issue our favorable letter of determination and our paperwork is complete (on the U.S. side anyway)!

Thursday, April 16, 2015

Dossier is back!

I just got an email from Chareyl that our dossier was received back from the Haitian consulate today! We have our dossier authenticated in its entirety now!!

All we need to have for our paperwork completely done (on the U.S. side) is to receive our favorable determination letter from USCIS.  And before that we have to have our fingerprints redone - and our appointment for that is tomorrow!

One step closer...

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Biometrics AND consulate!

Our assigned day/time for our electronic fingerprinting arrived in the mail today! For next Friday!

Of course I'm excited about this (it's one step closer to our favorable determination letter from USCIS, which is what we need to be able to submit our dossier to Haiti)...but of COURSE it's at the beginning of our two night girls' weekend to St. George. Grrr. It will make us leave a couple hours later than we would have liked. Luckily I have nice friends that will be understanding.

ALSO our completed dossier and translation was sent to the Haitian consulate in Chicago today!!!

I am excited at all this progress lately!!

Monday, April 6, 2015

DOSSIER TURNED IN!!! BAM!

Mark hand delivered our entire notarized and state authenticated dossier to our agency today!!! Woot woot! Not that there's not always a next step, but let's not worry about that right now. We are celebrating this big step!

Sunday, April 5, 2015

Good news!

In addition to receiving the authenticated letter of recommendation from Michigan in the mail AND all our Utah state authenticated documents back in the mail last week...there is even more good news!  Today it was announced during General Conference that a temple will be built in Haiti!  Right in their capitol city of Port-Au-Prince! What a blessing!

Temples are built as holy places to worship the Lord and make promises to Him, and we consider them literally the "House of the Lord" and therefor sacred.  There are currently over 19,000 members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Haiti and this will be their first temple!  I can only imagine the rejoicing on the part of these members of the church.  And, as a family who has already begun to embrace and love the country that our child will come from...we want the best for these people.  We hope that over the years we will see an increase in the Haitian people being able to be more and more self sustaining in every way - physically (with all the various affects of extreme poverty), mentally (particularly with greater access to education), and spiritually (continued growth of the gospel there and ability to attend the temple in their own country and language).  I pray that we may be able to find ways to contribute to those things for our brothers and sisters there, and today we rejoice that the blessings of heaven will be more greatly upon the people of Haiti as a temple will soon open its doors there!

Wonderful, wonderful news!

For those that have more questions about temples and why we build them, read here:
https://www.lds.org/church/temples/why-we-build-temples?lang=eng