Slightly discouraging news

Our dossier (adoption paperwork) should have been on it's way to Africa by now.  The dossier has to pass through several offices before it gets sent to Africa.  When we finished everything, we gave it to our social worker.

So it goes from us

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local social worker

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Agency's National Office

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Washington, DC

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Agency's National Office

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Ethiopia

A dossier should be ready to leave the country about a month after it is turned into the social worker.  Yesterday, we found out that it was left in our agency's national office for 3 weeks.  The person that usually handles the dossiers was out of the country for three weeks, and her assistant was unable to keep up with the extra work.  It should have been sent to DC a couple of weeks ago, but instead it was sent a few days ago.  Our sweet social worker was VERY apologetic, and I will admit that I was upset when I first learned of it, but after thinking about it for a few minutes I realized that it is not that big of a deal.  Even if it had been sent on time to DC, it still might not have gotten there much faster.  The severe snow storm that hit DC caused a delay in the delivery of mail, and I had started to worry that it would get lost in the mail with the backlog of deliveries.  Now I'm just glad that it's not lost.  Late is way better than lost!