Day 25 - Jakob Lunde

This evening there is one more family member with the name Lunde than there were this morning! All the documents and all the paperwork here in Cali are now done! Hooray!

This morning everything happened with breathtaking speed! Our case has been standing still at step 7 (see Day 9) for over a week now, first because the ICBF first couldn't get their act together to appoint a new attorney for our court, and then because their newly appointed attorney didn't feel ready to sign our documents yet.

But today at 10 AM, just as we got off the phone with Adopsjonsforum's office in Bogotá, who promised to help us get in touch with our contact person in Cali, we got a call from our lawyer (who speaks a little English herself) saying that one of us had to be ready to show up in court in ten minutes! She was on her way in a taxi to pick us up, and there was no time to wait for the translator!

Ulf quickly changed from shorts to nice pants, grabbed our passports, and was picked up outside the big steel gates of the stone wall surrounding our hotel. In the meantime the translator called and explained what was going on.

Our lawyer has been pleading, pushing and nagging the ICBF persistently until this morning the attorney finally signed the adoption documents (and only those), probably just so she would stop harassing him!

Once that happened, the rest was downhill. The secretary in our court is an old friend of our lawyer's, and he pushed our case through step 8 (which usually takes at least 10 days) in less than an hour, and (since today is Wednesday) step 9 as well! So now it was already time for step 10, the big milestone that every adopting couple (in Spanish: adoptantes) is waiting for: For the parents to sign the sentencia!

We could hardly believe it and were beside ourselves with joy and excitement! But we have seen other families here have setbacks just when they thought they had had breakthroughs, so we weren't about to change our tickets until we had actually held the signed and stamped documents in our hands.

Ulf spent the rest of the day running from one office to another together with Elena, our lawyer. They were in luck, and managed to catch all the necessary people, time all the meetings, pay all the fees, and meet all the deadlines with fine precision, so that by noon we had actually finished steps 12 and 13 too, with the exception of one final stamp and signature from a specific notary public on the new birth certificate!

We thought we would have that, too, done before they closed down all offices for lunch at 12:00, but the last clerk to check our sentencia, at 11:55 AM, discovered an error: on one (just one!) of the pages today's date was written as Veinticinco de Marzo instead of Veinticinco de febrero! So they refused to give us a birth certificate.

So we had lunch and started all over again, going to all the same offices after having fixed the error! Ulf had to come along this time, too, because the page with the erroneous date was one with his signature on it. When we finally got it done and returned to the notary public's office, the person who needed to sign the document, had left. But they said he'd be back at 4 PM. So our lawyer took all our documents and gave them to our translator, who returned at 4:00 PM, got the necessary last signature, and delivered everything at our hotel in the evening!

So although it formally takes three days before the ruling takes effect, we are in practice done in Cali and will finish the last steps in Bogotá on Monday and Tuesday!

It does not matter that we cannot finish the last steps this week, because this weekend is the end of a French holiday, so all Air France flights from Bogotá to Europe are completely full, and we can't get on them. Luckily, we have reserved seats on the flight to Paris on the evening of Tuesday, March 3rd (which we until this morning thought we'd probably have to change to a later date), and we will try to be on it, because none of the flights on the days just before and just after that has any free seats.

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While all this was going on, Jakob went to the zoo together with his friend Marie and her parents. (Mami also came along.) By the end of the day, he had broken our camera (but we don't care, since our stay here is at an end), his name was no longer Jákob, but Jakób, he no longer called us mámi and pápi, but mamí and papí, and our son had finally mastered the art of skarring, pronouncing Marie in a very French-sounding manner!


When it was time for him to go to bed, he got his first kiss from Marie, and he threw his arms around her neck and kissed her back!