I'm posting this without having Leah proofread it. There's probably more than a few few typos and missed commas, so thanks for understanding...
Well it's amazing how much we forget all the months of waiting once we got to India. The first few days especially were a blur. The exhaustion of the trip here, meeting our kid for the first time, then working to develop a bond with him to smooth the transition to us as his primary care givers, not to mention adjusting to living in a totally different culture and not speaking the language. This might be a little on the longer side, but there already has been quite a bit that has happened since our last post.
As we wrote before, we got in on Wednesday morning and checked into our hotel for a quick nap before heading to the orphanage. It was probably a mistake to nap, as we were worse off after two hours of sleeping. Regardless we wanted to get to the orphanage as soon as we could. It's probably roughly a mile and a quarter to the orphanage from the hotel. However, given our mental state at the time we really wanted to go the easiest way possible and hired one of the hotel drivers for a few hours. He didn't really speak any English but, we managed to use Google maps to get where we needed.
As a side note, there aren't really what you would think of as street numbers here. Every thing just seems to be referenced to some kind of land mark. I.e. "Near Tulja Bhawani Mandir, Opposite Home Guard Office, Kududand, Bilaspur". I guess that's what happens in cities that are as old and densely populated as the cities in India.
The first orphanage experience was overwhelming, but we found ourselves being comfortable quickly. After arriving at the orphanage we very tentatively made our way through a couple gates and up the stairs. We were clearly pretty anxious at this point. We were greeted by a friendly older couple in a small office which had a few chairs, couches, and a coffee table and there was not much more room.
We sat down and said hello, and it was about 15 seconds before this small toddler came waddling in another door, holding onto the hands of one of the women care givers. It was surreal... but both Leah and I had the same thought... wait a minute, we're adopting a little boy, not a girl. As it turns out the staff at the orphanage had a lot of fun dressing Gaurav up, and they put his hair in pig tails. It was really cute, once we got over the surprise. Leah said she's heard that the staff working in orphanages take a lot of pride in how the kids look and put a lot of effort into dressing them up. So we saw quite a few cute outfits over the next couple days. We have a ton of photos of him, and we're looking forward to sharing them as soon as we have the signed court order, then he is legally our son.
Gaurav was pretty quick to warm up to us. He is a pretty outgoing little boy, which helped us feel comfortable around him right away. We had heard of the stories of kids just crying constantly when their new parents show up, thankfully, we did not have that situation. The staff also helped with the transition as much as they could. You could tell there was an effort by all the staff to call us mom and dad and make sure that he interacted more with us than them. We brought a few small toys to help make us more appealing. Which seemed to work pretty well, and it turns out we got a very busy boy on our hands. He almost never stopped moving. They told us that everyone that works there and visits really loves Gaurav. It was easy to see why, he has a lot of personality. We were also reassured pretty quickly that he had great care in his time there. It's one of those things that was always in the back of our minds since we first saw his picture a year ago. Its so hard to imagine what he was experiencing a half a world away. We stayed about 90 minutes that first visit and caught our ride back to the hotel. We were told we could keep visiting a couple times per day while we waited for the court hearing on Friday.
So on Thursday we stopped by at 11:00 AM and around 5:00 PM. Nap time is supposed to start around 1:00. We were informed that Gaurav doesn't do much napping. Maybe just a few minutes here and there. So that will be fun to figure out. Every time we visited he clearly got a little more comfortable around us. He always wanted to play ball with us. Apparently from about the age of one, he has been using a bat and playing "baseball". Really it's a cricket bat, and there are a lot of things besides balls that are getting hit.
Friday morning was our court hearing, the orphanage director told us to arrive early to meet him and our lawyer at the court house (11:00 is early here, which was surprising since it's so hot, you really think they'd start the day early). The court complex is even closer than the orphanage so the hotel driver was able to get us there. It seemed to be as much an outdoor facility as an indoor one. There was an area full of tables and chairs and a few men with briefcases were assembling. However, we really had no idea where we needed to be. Not a single person we could find spoke English. After a couple minutes where clearly we looked totally lost, eventually someone pointed us to sit down at a large table. It was still a little before 11:00 but, we had not seen any familiar faces from the orphanage. I think our driver was trying to help us but the language barrier made it difficult. I eventually pulled out Google Translate on my phone to tell him he didn't have to wait for us since we didn't know how long it would be. I think he maybe he interpreted that as "go away" and he just ended up walking a couple laps around the courtyard. I felt kind of like a jerk, but what are you going to do. We tried calling and emailing the orphanage using the contact info we had, but we never got through to anyone useful. Finally, the director showed up and waved us down at about 11:20. I guess we were waiting in the wrong spot and we needed to go to another building.
We set up waiting in a hallway where we were still not given very much information. We were prepared for a pretty long day. There was a couple from Spain adopting a little girl from the same orphanage that we had met the day before. They had court on Thursday and said that they were there almost the whole day waiting. We were called into the court room after about 10 minutes, things got really confusing after that... We were directed toward one of two benches sitting in the court room. The judge sat in the middle of a big desk which had a guy on a computer on either side of her. She had a very stern look on her face, which was not very relaxing, I think we were both about as nervous as we had been for the whole trip to that point. There were a couple boxes that kind of looked like witness boxes on either side of the desk. After we sat for a few seconds I was tugged on the arm and directed to stand in one of the boxes. The lawyer and judge spoke in Hindi for maybe a minute. I was preparing myself to be questioned. I had heard some families have an extended period of questioning. Just about that time, they pointed me back to the bench.
I sat back down and about 3 seconds later someone tugged on us and directed us back to the judges office. She told us to have a seat at a small desk. Thankfully she spoke English, and was extremely friendly. In fact her son, who must have been about 10, was sitting at her computer watching YouTube. She asked us a few questions, How old are you? What are your jobs? Why do you want to adopt from India? and then after a little bit of note taking she asked if we wanted a selfie with her. That was it she told us we could go back out and sit and wait. That only lasted about a minute too then we were told they had all of our "evidence" and we would hear back around 4 or 5:00. So we headed over to the orphanage for a visit. The other couple was there and had told us that they expected their written court order on the 18th of March. Which made us optimistic that ours would come right about that time too. The wait for the court order was a major factor in deciding if we were going to wait here in India while the paperwork cleared, or if we would go home.
The bad news was that we found out that the court order wasn't going to be signed until March 25th. It was frustrating. 2 1/2 weeks of waiting, and then we still need to apply for his passport, which would add a week or two. We debated for a while about what the best decision was. In the end we decided that given the arduous trip that we'd have to go through to get home, and then back again a month later it made more sense to stay. Furthermore, when you start crunching the budget numbers, it's probably less expensive to stay. Plus we really wanted to start getting to bond with our little boy and transition him out of the orphanage to our hotel. Unfortunately we had to wait a few more days to do that too. In fact, they needed to arrange a "giving ceremony" and it would take about a week to get together. That plan ended up changing somewhat unexpectedly to bring him home sooner. But more on that later.
We visited a couple times a day on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Sunday night was quite busy since they had a lot of college age volunteers who came to play with the kids. We kept taking over more of the feeding and care each time. We got to know some of the staff a little better and meet some of their families.
So that covers us up through Sunday, and somehow it's already Wednesday afternoon as I'm writing this. Things didn't slow down much the next couple days. The good news is that we found out Monday night that we were going to be able to bring Gaurav back to the hotel with us to start fostering. It's considered fostering until we have the final signed court order, which again, won't come until March 25. We had a medical appointment that night, and it was just as confusing as court. Hopefully, I'll have a little time to write that up in the next few days. Then yesterday there was a handing over ceremony. Of course I was suffering through a stomach bug for that, but I survived... Vomiting in a squat toilet is not something I really want to do again. We brought our little boy back to the hotel in the afternoon and we've been getting adjusted. He slept very hard, and cried a little, but I'm very impressed with how resilient he is. If things go well the next couple days we'll keep the updates coming. We're going to be here a few more weeks, but it's been a great opportunity to learn about Gaurav's native culture first-hand. That said, we can't wait to get home.
And we can't wait for you ALL to be back home, too!!