When news become good news

Thursday, I received an email from the USCIS and my heart raced as I thought they sent us our i600 (orphan investigation) approval. It was only a week ago that they received all needed documents, so this would have been a super fast approval, the average is 30-60 days. Instead they asked for more documentation and corrected documentation. Of course, it is good that they are careful with each investigation and even smallest discrepancies should be corrected. Also, it gave me hope that once we comply with their requests, they will be ready to conclude and approve our i600. So not THE news I was hoping for, but a promising start.

As I re-read the email again, something popped out that I hadn't seen before. It mentions a city that is in one of our reports. I went back to our paperwork, found the part that mentions the city and in the past I assumed it was a suburb of the capital, Accra. As I googled this city, I noticed it was quite far from the capital and the likely place Afua was born in. Wow, more details about her past came out and I would have never been able to figure this out on my own.

That's when the email went from ok news to good news. We will likely never know Afua's parents or all the circumstances of her early life. So these little nuggets of information are like gold to me. Good news.

When Eric was in Ghana, he was trying to see if we could somehow figure out Afua's hometown. She has marks on the side of the face, which we thought were tribal marks. This would have been a clue to her birth place. Turns out they were from a tribal healer, who makes small cuts into a body part and then places ashes (or something similar) into the cuts in attempt to cure a disease. Her family may have taken her to a healer in order to cure her CP or another disease during the first year of her life. So what we thought was a clue to her past, ended up being something else.

So we rejoice in the small clues we get to Afua's past, we rejoice that her case is being reviewed with understanding and care. Once we have the additional information, we should be very close to a conclusion of the investigation. And another step closer to bringing her home.