He's an Armstrong!

It's official- we have Samuel's birth certificate! The staff at the RENAP office in Jalapa were refreshingly friendly and it didn't take long to get things done. Almost two months to the day of getting out of PGN, we have a birth certificate! Thank You, Lord!

Today I got up at 4:30 and headed out about an hour later for Jalapa. Samuel stayed home with the sitter. Jalapa is quite a drive. We passed several "derrumbes" (mudslide/rockslides) along the road. I was so thankful it wasn't raining today as the road would have been pretty treacherous in some parts. It was hilly, curvy and lush. We saw lots of farms and cattle. Samuel's birthmom is actually from a small town outside of Jalapa. We saw the road sign for her town pointing down a little dirt road (see below :)). Due to rain and mudslides, we were told it would take another hour to get there, so we didn't go.

Apparently people from Jalapa are known for being "latino" (not Mayan- didn't see any of the traditional Mayan dress). Apparently they are also known for being tough. Mayra said you don't want to make someone from Jalapa mad. Many of the men had on cowboy hats and pistols in the RENAP office. Guess they don't have much of a law against carrying weapons. When we headed out of town, we passed a mom with her little boy walking on the road.... the mom was carrying a machete that had to be 3 feet long. I'm thinking I wouldn't mess with her!

We are excited for the progress, but ask for prayers that we can get his passport and 2nd DNA test done this week. Then we will be so close to the end! I also ask for prayers for many of our friends whose cases are stuck in PGN right now. We know of 2 or 3 families (including the Whitworth's and the Embrey's second girl, Caterin) whose cases are signed and approved to get out of PGN, but due to "computers being down", the cases haven't left PGN yet. This is the 3rd week of the "computer issues". We are starting to wonder what is going on! We've emailed the embassy without a lot of results. If you are so inclined to write the US embassy here in Guatemala, here are some email addresses:

Adoptguatemala@state.gov and Guatemala.adoptions@dhs.gov . You get an auto-reply, but we're hoping if we keep bombarding them, the embassy will do something to put some pressure on PGN to do their job. Right now the embassy just says "we can't interfere". Thanks for your support and happy Monday!