Help Please!

Dear Friends and Family,

As most (if not all) of you know, Matt and I are in the process of adopting our second child. On April 23, we were offered a baby girl named Margarita. We were ecstatic! We knew there were risks involved in starting a Guatemalan adoption at that time, but our attorneys and we felt very confident that we could complete our adoption before anything catastrophic happened. You see, there has been an ongoing concern that Guatemala was going to shut down their adoption process with the U.S. I can't really explain all the details because I don't COMPLETELY understand them myself.

Well, this week has been a very negatively busy week in the Guatemalan adoption world. The President of Guatemala has announced that as of January 1se, 2008 all adoptions to the U.S. will be suspended. This announcement is very devastating to all of us involved in Guatemalan adoptions. I am including a few links that can give you more information regarding the situation. One concern with this announcement is that it is not consistent previous announcements and can be considered unconstitutional. The hope at this point is to convince the Guatemalan government to "grandfather" in all "in-process" cases and allow us to complete our adoptions regardless of the Jan.1 deadline, or potentially extend the Jan. 1 date. Suspending all adoptions on Jan. 1 will be devastating to thousands of families and leave thousands of children with an unknown future. Here are the links with more information...

http://travel.state.gov/family/adoption/country/country_389.html
http://www.guatadopt.com/
http://www.adaguatemala.org/English/news/
http://www.focusonadoption.com/
http://jcics.org/Guatemala5000.htm

Hopefully, you will be able to just click the links above. If not...just copy and paste into your browser and you should be able to view the sites.

In addition to sharing information with you. I want to ask each of you to sign the following on-line petitions requesting that our government do everything in their power to pressure the Guatemalan government to grandfather in all of us in-process cases. This truly is what is best for the children and that is my main concern. Leaving all these children without permanent homes or the care they need will be absolutely terrible. Please read the petitions carefully and sign if you agree and want to show your support.

http://www.petitiononline.com/41203gm/petition.html
http://www.petitiononline.com/foafoa1/petition.html

Again, I hope you can just click on the link above...but, if not just copy and paste into your browser.

If you have the time and energy, another way to help is to e-mail your congress people. You can do so by visiting www.congress.org. You simply type in your zip code and the site will lead you to your congress people and their contact info. I have e-mailed all of mine already. I think the louder we all are, the better the chances we can get results.

Please help these children and families wanting to be united forever.

Thank you in advance for your support, and if you have any questions please feel free to contact me.

Sincerely,
Amy Goldstein

P.S. Of course there is always the possibility that our adoption process will be complete prior to Jan. 1, and all of this may not actually affect us. We are praying that this is the case. However, we feel very connected to the Guatemalan Adoption world and want ALL of these children to be allowed to come home!