First Legalization!

We received word Saturday that our dossier has received First Legalization from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Haiti. I understand this is similar to the notarization, state authentication, and legalization by the Haitian Consulate here in the US (Chicago) that we had to do before sending our dossier to Haiti. It’s just one more step to them wanting to be sure that our dossier is legal.

The orphanage staff in Haiti have already begun to gather Elijah & Josephine’s paperwork to be combined with our dossier. This includes birth certificates (with no date or spelling errors) – apparently vital records like this are often not correct because most children are not born in hospitals. They also will have a social worker write up a social history for the children (as we had to do in our home study), get psych evaluations and medical certificates for the children, and get official photo IDs for the birth parents, which could apparently take some time if they do not already have one.

Somewhere in there our dossier also has to get first and second consentment in the courts, but I’m not sure when exactly. And, once all this information is gathered in a combined dossier, it gets submitted to IBESR (Haitian Social Services) for four signatures of approval.