Passionately seeking change in Consulate Appoinment

I am floating this morning and only three hours of sleep. I had contacted my agency and asked them to try and change our CA, no luck. I contacted our Congressmen and discussed the possibilities and they tried, no luck. Last ditch effort I contacted a couple of the China adoption yahoo groups and asked if anyone ever walked in to the Consulate and requested an earlier appointment on the day of.

I had talked to Jennifer, my personal travel agent and an awesome one at that if you should ever need one,    jennifer@watvl.com.      and it was going to cost a quite a bit to change my ticket and Yu Lei's. Plus I was envisioning my family waving to us from the terminal as we stayed behind. It was all too much. I knew I wasn't finished with this fight.

One of the e-mails I received was from a woman who said in 2006 she had to call the consulate and they were fantastic. I had the Consulate number, given to me from the U.S. Immigration, somewhere in my paperwork from a problem we had months before. At 10:00 PM our time and 1:00 PM China time I tried all our cell phones and our house phone to discover we have no long distance. I texted our friend Rashed, who I know has long distance, but no response.

I saw our new neighbor's light was on and her door open, so I went over to ask if she had long distance. She didn't, we talked and then she asked if I was a Christian and if she could pray over me. Absolutely! Her prayers were so pointed and so right on. God directed her every word to cover all emotions and situations we have gone through. She ended her prayer asking God for a peace and an answer. Finishing the prayer my phone beeped a text message.

It was Rashed saying, Come on over!

Deborah said, Well, there it is!

And I said, Oh, the answer!

Rashed helped me with the phone call. It took many tries but persistence got us a real human on the line from the adoption unit. She heard me out and then asked me to write it all down in an e-mail and she said it would be dealt with directly. I was so afraid to hang up from her and so I had her repeat and hear me repeat the e-mail address about a dozen times.

So I wrote it out with Rashed's assistance. I wanted to use words like humble; he insisted I use words like optimistic. He was so helpful. It was our $2500 letter. That would be about the price to stay another 4 days and change airfare, not to mention stress.

I went home and waited and some hours later received a beautiful, short message..'We will be able to accomodate you on June 2.'