An Authentic Wait

I guess I'm determined to make a reference to our being in a waiting phase in every post until we receive a referral. But, we did get some good news yesterday. Here's what our social worker passed on from the Bethany home office:

"We received the dossier for the Shumate family back from authentication today."

This is the one area of dossier prep that I had not fully understood until I just did some reviewing of our instructions and other research. You see, in most of the instructions, we are told which documents require "State Seal and Authentication." So, for some reason I just assumed they went together hand in hand - that the state did the authentication and seal. The SW corrected me a couple months ago and said, no, we send the dossier for authentication once you get all those state seals.

I was thinking it was something akin to an expert signing off one last time on their legitimacy kinda like a certificate of authentication for a famous person's autograph. If I recall, I even used this comparison before.

Well, sorta, but not quite...

In actuality, these documents are even more like gold now. They have been authenticated by the Guatemalan consulate in NYC!!! That means a representative of the Guatemalan government has seen them and said - yah, they look like the real deal.

Of course, that's not technically getting us any closer to Carmen, but it does mean our paperwork is in order at this point, and hopefully will not cause any delays later on in the process. That doesn't mean a speedy process, just hopefully one less thing to worry about after referral. Did I ever tell you that our agency and social worker are awesome?