Extortion and other niceties

We are still on for September 9th. That's the good news. We know we are in the court register. The way we know... well that's the issue. You see, our first lawyer (also known as the lawyer we fired - or rather the lawyer with whom we "closed the case until further notice") sent a letter to the orphanage saying he knew about our September 9th court date from looking at the court registers. He also said we owed him $550 (his full fee) for not doing any work. He claimed that he had organized a court date for us but that we never returned his calls. Funny, considering he never returned our calls... and when he did it was with a text message asking us to use our hard-earned phone units to call him back. I got the impression from Dustin that the lawyer was hinting in his letter that he might find a way to interfere with our current court date if we didn't pay him in full...

Dustin, my good husband, has been hiding this information from me for the past week or so as he didn't want to cause me undue stress. Our current lawyer said he would try to take care of this issue, but finally said we'd just have to pay. He advised talking the fee down by half. That's exactly what Dustin did. Goodbye two hundred and fifty dollars.

Dustin had a meeting with our current lawyer this week - to go over any issues and paperwork related to our court date. They haven't yet secured an affidavit from the Social Welfare Officer, though we're hoping this will be done by the end of the week. That affidavit would take the place of the SWO should he fail to appear at court that day - a strong possibility from what we know and understand. Our lawyer doesn't appear too concerned. He seems to think that our approved home study from an American adoption agency will be credible enough to wow any judge. We can hope!

Please remember that our court date is on Tuesday morning - in Malawi. Here, it will be Monday night. I'll let you know what time it will take place as soon as I hear from Dustin. (The phone lines have been giving us a lot of trouble lately.)

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Here are two new photos of my boys: