What the heck is up right now? There is so much going on in Vietnam adoptions right now that I can hardly keep up. I’m sad for my friends who may be caught in the I600 processing changes due to impending travel. But I’m also excited because for the first time in a very long time I feel like the Embassy cares and is working proactively and not just lending lip service to adoption ethics.

I’m sad to hear that more and more parents are being forced to leave Vietnam without their babies due to NOIDs but happy that the Embassy is finally stepping up and scrutinizing and seeing what many of us have seen since traveling – corruption is still alive and well in Vietnam. There are some really corrupt provinces (Phu Tho, which is where Addison is from, Thai Nguyen) and these provinces are fed by agencies who tolerate the corruption and those agencies are fed by PAPs who hire them even knowing they have received NOIDs. For the record, and I don’t say this lightly, any agency that is still working in Phu Tho or Thai Nguyen after all the recent trouble is unethical on that premise alone. Any agency that blames an orphanage for an NOID deserves to be mistrusted becuase they clearly do not see their role as advocates for the children they have referred out. Thankfully the agency I used for Addison’s adoption seems to no longer be working in Phu Tho at all along with a few other agencies but the troublemakers are still making trouble.

There are some weeks I feel totally frustrated and hopeless about the state of adoptions worldwide and specifically in Vietnam. There are are weeks like this one where, as full of tension and anxiety as it seemed to be, there was an underlying feeling of improvement. Baby steps.

Meanwhile, I’m completely distracted with almost no online time this week. Usually I can leave the computer for a day or two and catch up in a half hour. This week I couldn’t leave for an afternoon without coming back to insanity.

What has me so busy this week?  I have family in town staying here and coincidentally I went and bought a new gift for my children that coincided with my Father’s arrival. I was cruising our local online classified ads when an ad caught my eye for a custom indoor playhouse. The family was moving and wanted to sell rather than ship it. Cheap. On a whim I emailed for pictures and totally fell in love. It is 8′x7′ and just adorable. Hubby agreed and the nice fellow selling it said it wouldn’t be any problem to reconstruct and he’d have it apart and ready for us to pick up by the next day.

We made arrangements with a friend to come with us, grabbed my Dad just after he arrived and took off to pick up the house. Once the men arrived they realized that the seller had not taken the house apart *at all*. At that point, had I been there, I’d have turned heel and walked out the door. Or refused to pay anything more than half. But I think Tony was afraid to break my heart so he stayed and tore that thing apart with the help of his buddy and my Dad.

Getting this thing back together is an entirely different dilemma entirely. It is NOT in fact easy to assemble. In fact, it’s like building a (very small) house. It is a HUGE undertaking. Let’s just saying building isn’t exactly Tony’s forte. I actually really really love it but I’m not that experienced in building without instructions so my wonderful Daddy set to task and got out his power tools (I think he knows by now that any visit to my house automatically must involve power tools so he just packs them with the underwear) and starting building it while I sat idly by helping when and where I could. My part includes things such as curtains and paint! haha. Seriously I’ve actually had a good time helping him out and watching it all come together. I can’t wait until its really done.

Noah keeps saying things like “I think the final touch should be a small sized vent in the floor with a thermostat that controls the heat and air”. haha.

Pictures forthcoming.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Adoption, Crafty, Taboo Topics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.