8/22/2006 - Adoption Update e-mail

Hola Familia y Amigos,

For some of you this will be the first update letter that you've
received, and for others the second. I'll try to bring you all up to
speed. Since January, we have been working on adopting three beautiful
young girls from Trujillo, Peru. After spending several month filling
out paperwork, getting things notarized, getting physicals, getting a
psychological exam, writing our biographies, and anything else you might
imagine, we finally turned all the necessary documentation into our
adoption agency, and it arrived in Peru around July 4th with the
exception of one INS document. This document arrived in the mail a
little later, but turned out to be the wrong thing, in short, because
Illinois is a goofy state. After some frantic calls, we received the
right INS document a couple weeks later , and I was also asked to send a
notarized affidavit stating that Timothy E. Brooks (which is on my birth
certificate) is the same guy as "Tim E. Brooks" (which is on my driver's
license and passport). After these documents went through the
legalization process, we finally had everything turned into Peru around
the end of July. Our hope was that we might still get the call that we
had been approved sometime in the beginning of August since 98% of the
documentation had gone down early in July. But as most of you know day
after day went by with no new news.

Well, I'm very please to announce that today we finally got the call!
Thank God! We have been approved to adopt the girls. However, we still
have to wait for Peru to send us the "Letter of Suitability" for us to
sign. This will be sent to us by e-mail, but is not expected to arrive
until next week. When we get this letter we will sign it, scan it, and
send it back to them. At that point we are free to travel! So..... It
looks like next week we will finally go down to Peru. It is expected
that the whole process will take anywhere from 4 to 6 weeks to
complete. This means we will return sometime at the end of September or
the beginning of October.

It's been a very long journey, but at long last we are finally going to
bring our girls home.

We will keep you informed of our progress in the upcoming weeks as we
travel.

Thank you all for your support and prayers.

Tim and Andrea Brooks