A man behind a glass window

We continue to promise a blog about the G&R, especially for those of you going to Lang Son and who will likely meet birth parents there.

But we missed another step, the first embassy interview with Mr. Adamson, the man behind the glass window. We blogged about Wednesday before we told you about Tuesday.

The US embassy is in the upscale western business office side of the city. There is a covered driveway leading up to a big office building. You step inside and walk up a tall flight of stairs to the second floor where the consular visa section is located. You go through a metal detector. They take a driver's license and keep it while you are there for identification. If you carry a cell phone or camera, they check it for you, but you are not supposed to bring electronic devices. They sell a few US embassy Hanoi items, like hats and t-shirts there.

In the consular section, there are a bunch of service windows and chairs set up in a waiting room. It wasn't clear to me if Martin alerted them to our presence or if they were expecting us. But he ushered Marci and I to a window where we each had to pay an additional fee for our second baby and therefore a second I600 application. If you are adopting families members, more than one child, this extra fee does not apply, but our babies aren't real twins. I tried to pay the $540 with cash, but a machine kept spitting out the perfectly clean and crisp $100 bills we had brought and carefully stored for this purpose. So we used Visa.

Then we waited a few minutes. There is a water cooler in the reception area, and the water was really cold on a hot day outside. People keep telling us, remember to keep hydrated! Marci's name was called, I don't remember how, and she and her babies went through a door. They reemerged fiften or twenty minutes later.

When they came out, we saw a man behind a glass window, and he invited us in. I realized that it was a small room, actually almost a closet, maybe four feet by six feet even, with two folding chairs. We barely fit in there with our stroller and two babies. Mr. Adamson sat behind a glass window, like the kind they have in Chicago at Harold's Chicken or at the gas stations in inner city neighborhoods.

He spent a lot of time spelling out the procedure. This interview was to evaluate that our adoption had been conducted properly. Adopting in Vietnam, he wanted us to know, is not the same as adopting from China, for example, where adoption procedures are programmatic and institutionalized; in Vietnam, each case is different. He did not want to alarm us, but there had been cases, for example, where it had been discovered that a child's mother had not, in fact, agreed to an adoption of her child, and the adoption had been stopped.

At that point I told Mr. Adamson that we had met with birth mothers of our babies; they had publicly given their babies to us. Is it possible that these were not the real mothers of the babies, I asked? We also could have told him how careful, professional, and thorough Ms. Thiuy, the Lang Son official at the Ministry of Justice, had been. I don't really remember his answer--but he kind of skipped on with his presentation, which laid out the timeline. After this interview, the file would be reviewed in Ho Chi Minh City and in three to five days we would hear back from the embassy to return for a second visa appointment--assuming that the review was satisfactory. We have a flight on Thursday night, we told him--any chance we will get out by then? The process, he told us, would be three to five days--assuming no power outages. A power outage might cause a delay.

He proceeded to ask us questions about fees we paid, whether any special fees had been requested or added during our visit, and how long the drive was to Lang Son. He wanted us to describe the orphanage and give our impressions of the care there. He does not get to all the orphanages, he told us. We told him the orphanage had about 100 children, from what we understand, of different ages; it has a soccer field, even.

He then asked us some questions mainly about Au Su Nghiep. Again we mentioned that we had also met the birth mothers and visited the ministry of justice for a Giving and Receiving. Marci, it turns out, had told him about meeting both the mothers of her babies; he seemed surprised, she thought. He seemed almost suprised again that we had met the birth mothers--but that might not be fair because he seemed to want to keep a very straight attitude.

The one glitch in the interview was when he said the fingerprints on our I171H had expired. It turned out that he had a old copy of the I171H produced before we updated our fingerprints. The new one had been cabled to Ho Chi Minh City and the US consulate there, so he should have it. He had the one our agency must have submitted in its original dossier that was submitted to the Vietnamese province. But we simply gave him a copy of the new one with the updated fingerprint information, which we had with us. He copied it for his records.

The end of the meeting was kind of anticlimactic. It just seemed that time was up and he told us again we should wait for a call in three to five days.

We left the little room, with Mr. Adamson still sitting behind the window. Then we all left the embassy.

Next stop was for Marci and I to pick up the Vietnamese passports for the children at the "police station." The taxi ride was awful, because the driver did not turn on his AC--or else it didn't work. But the AC was on at the police station, and our stay was very quick, which was good because Marci and I each carried a baby. We had a reciept from the previous visit telling us to return at 3 PM that day, Monday. We went to a new window, presented the reciept, and waited a couple minutes. They called our names, looked at our passports. Then they had us sign the receipt, and they gave us the passports for the babies. Martin had asked us to check the names, birth dates, and gender on the passports. We did so, then he did so again.

Meanwhile, Peggy with a baby, Marci's daughter Katie with a baby, and the new World Child staffer Kenny went on ahead to a photo shop to get passport photos take of our babies for their US visa applications. We arrived to get the two babies we carried with us photographed. It turns out to have been at the same shop where we had had pictures produced the previous week.

Peggy and I and the babies told Martin we would walk home, and we went to the Vinaconex, our Walmart, for some supplies, and later walked back to the hotel.

Just so you know how out of control we all have become, Marci and Katie took a cyclo with the babies!