Hello world! It is now time for another adoption update. Well, technically the one-month mark will be April 2nd, but since today is March 29th it is close enough.
I’ll start with my puzzle piece fundraiser. Since last month, we have only sold 2 more pieces. Which leaves 455 pieces left for sale at $20 apiece. If you wish to purchase a puzzle piece to help fund out adoption expenses please see our crowdfunding page. During this month, we finally were able to receive our homestudy write up. Which means, that apart from our birth certificates (more on that later) we are basically ready to go with submission on our homestudy! There were some obvious parts that needed to be corrected, so we tackled those first, as they were the easiest. Then we spent the next couple of weeks reading over it carefully and making any changes where necessary. It is a rather long document. It has to cover every detail about our lives, like where we have lived since 18 (which, for me is A LOT of addresses) who our immediate family is, their jobs, ages, what kind of people they are, how they disciplined us, such things. We even had to provide details about our siblings. We also had to sign away our right to privacy. We will not have our privacy rights back until after the adoption is finalized. It sounds scary, but they aren’t going to advertise us publicly. It just means that they can talk about intimate details of our lives between agencies/people without having to always seek our consent. Reading the homestudy was both boring, and interesting. Boring, because I already know all these things about myself, and having to read it multiple times to make sure there is no mistake makes me tired of hearing about myself. Not only that, but at my job, I have to introduce myself to all my classes every year (about 22 classes) and it gets old. It was also interesting because I have never read anything that painted someone in such a positive light that wasn’t an adoring fan of a celebrity. I especially liked the descriptions of the home. Whether or not she actually meant it, I don’t care, I just like that she even said my decorating, as minimal as it is, was tasteful. Another thing that was part of our homestudy was to complete a living will. As we don’t have any assets apart from skates (which I will take with me should their ever be an evacuation), so making the will was ridiculously easy. On the site, it also asked if we desired to make funeral arrangements, and I got so excited and got a little carried away. Let’s just say that Spiderman might be a part of it. The most important part of the will was appointing godparents, which we did. I am not sharing whom because it doesn’t matter. We did carefully consider who we would choose to ensure the right caretakers of our adopted child. Anyway, after we checked very carefully our homestudy, we sent it back to our social worker to make any final corrections. I haven’t heard from her since I sent it back, but it is not unusual for her to take a week to respond to me. She is a very busy woman. Now for some semi good news. The checks for our birth certificate copies have cleared! This is excellent news! Just hearing that the checks have cleared gives me hope that they will be in our possession in min-April. With those in hand, we can successfully send in our paperwork to our social worker in Japan and begin scheduling our homestudy. EEEK! I am so excited I can’t wait. This news has seriously improved my mood, along with the blossoming cherry blossoms. I love them, and I love this news. I know last month, I talked about saving $500 every month, so I am expecting you to be asking if we have $1500 in savings this month. The answer to that, is no, we don’t. Not because I went on a crazy shopping spree, but because I sustained a sports injury. I got hurt BAD and the only way to afford the treatments was to dabble into our savings. It was either that, or suffer extreme pain and little to no mobility for days on end. I couldn’t drink or eat anything due to the injury, I had to see someone. Unfortunately, that means we have been set back on our goal. About $367 short of our goal for the month. We received a couple of donations this past month and those helped pay for our food and transportation, as I could not ride my bike. Don’t worry, I am fully recovered now and there is no need to worry about me. I still see the doctor, but it is every other week now, instead of every day or every other day. Speaking of money, some people have been asking why I don’t apply for adoption grants or loans. The thing about those is you have to have a completed and approved homestudy. We don’t have that yet. We won’t have that until USCIS gives us the glorious stamp of approval. That can take months. Not to mention that we have to front the USCIS application fee which is around $1000. Let’s just hope and pray that we don’t have to pay that AND save for the Japanese homestudy at the same time. I don’t know how we can afford to pay for things then. I knew going into this that it was going to be expensive. Originally, I was planning on doing everything myself and not asking for donations from anyone. However, we quickly realized that that was impossible unless we were rich because we were already $9000 invested and still had another $20,000 to go. We were sucked dry by that point. There was no way we were going to be able to do this on our own without some sort of assistance. Therefore, that is why we decided to open a crowdfunding page with YouCaring. It may have been bad timing with the holidays right around the corner, but now is the right time. Tax refunds are being issued and many people want to either save or donate a small portion to a big cause. As expats, we aren’t qualified for any refund or tax credit. We have to pay money out of pocket to have our taxes done and get no money in return. But the common citizen does. Please consider donating to our cause. I wouldn’t be asking if we weren’t already in a desperate situation. We are in jeopardy of not be able to move forward with the adoption. If this USCIS application fee comes due at the same time as our Japanese homestudy, then we will have to forfeit the adoption and I don’t want to do that. There is a child out there, who needs a family, more than we need money. We don’t know who he/she is, be we already love him/her. We pray and them all the time, we think about them all the time, we make plans as a family all the time. Even a donation as small as $20 can make a difference. I have 1000 followers of this blog. If each person were to donate $20, then that would be my goal right there! Please consider a donation. We can’t do this without you. #ItTakesAVillage
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Welcome to day 2 of the wonderful Gunma Golden Guide sponsored by JR East. Enjoy! We woke up rather early because we needed to leave to drive to Kusatsu. They served us breakfast at the hotel and it was very Japanese. Not much in the way of breakfast as we Americans would think it to be. If you have been following me long enough you would have read about the first encounter with Japanese breakfasts. (You can read about it here) It was basically the same without the buffet. I can’t eat heavy food like that in the morning so I just stuck to basic foods like fish and rice with some juice, and a little bit of tofu. After breakfast, some people went back to the onsen once more, but I went back to my room to rest some more before check out. We left the hotel a little late because not everyone was in the lobby. Probably because they had gone to the onsen. Once we were all ready, we were crammed into a small bus and taken to Kusatsu. We picked up a tour guide along the way, who happened to speak English as he had spent 12 years in the western part of the US. He was excited to be speaking English with most of us. (Not everyone could speak English). On January 23rd, Mt. Shirane (in Kusatsu) erupted. One person from the Japanese defense force was killed and 10 others were injured from the blast. Thank goodness, it wasn’t worse. As a result of the explosion, volcanic ash was everywhere, then it had snowed again and there were patches of fresh clean snow on top of ash covered snow. It also still smelled of ash. The park we went to has been closed to the public since the eruption, but they made an exception for us and other licensed professionals. The park is going to be reopened to the public on April 7th. It is a little sad to not have a peak there anymore, it was a beautiful mountain. We were instructed in how to put on snowshoes which was really quite easy. Some people had a hard time getting their straps on properly or putting the shoes on the wrong feet, so it took a while. Because of leaving late, and people taking a long time to put their shoes on, we were unable to visit an onsen in Kusatsu. Unfortunate, but it could not be helped. It was difficult to figure out how to walk in the shoes at first. You had to keep your feet a little further apart than usual, plus you had to lift your feet higher than normal. I kept tripping over myself until I got the hang of it. Every so often, the guide would stop to explain some nature to us, or talk about the location. The weather was quite warm so all the places the sun hit had no snow. We had to hike in a sort of zigzag pattern. During WWII, the train line that now runs from Takasaki to Naganohara-Kusatsuguchi was built for steel mining purposes. After WWII, the line was demolished and wasn’t rebuilt for the public until the mid-60s. The line was also extended to accommodate tourists. In fact, the original train that was built specifically for that line, the Gunma train 115, recently retired on March 16th. I was told that they actually held a sayonara ceremony for the train. In the near future, they will close all train stations past Naganohara-Kusatsugushi because more and more people are leaving. Many schools in that area are merging and others are closing entirely. Whole communities are being uprooted and relocated because of the state of the economy. (Japan is suffering from a shrinking population, but that is topic for another day). During our hike, we came across one of the old ore mining spots. The quality is not that good so they no longer mine for steel in Kusatsu. Just across from the ore mining was what I believe they called the “Golden Triangle.” We were in Gunma, but we were just a 600-meter hike in either direction from Nagano or Niigata. I tried to take a good photo but so was everybody else so it didn’t work out for me. Along the hike, we saw animal tracks, bear scratches, and ash. Lots and lots of volcanic ash. We weren’t that close to Mt. Shirane and it was amazing to me how far the ash traveled. By the time we reached the top, my shoulders and neck were about to give out and I needed to stop, but thankfully we made it to the peak (or as much of the peak as we could access) and could take a break from hiking. We took our snowshoes off and walked around the natural hot spring while taking pictures. The acidic level was extremely high. The guide kept joking with us about swimming in it. He said, “If you have ever wanted to know what a REAL hot spring feels like, by all means jump in…..You will die, but at least you will know what it was like.” Seeing the source of a hot spring was really neat. The water was coming from the Earth. I had never seen that before. It was boiling. As it flowed down the mountain, it cooled enough for the moss to grow alongside it. That particular moss is the only life that can survive by the water. It needs a specific acidic level to flourish. Some places use calcium to neutralize the water for the people to use as onsens, but that kills the moss, and when the moss dies, it hurts other parts of the ecosystem. As a result, they have started making nature preserves in various parts of the mountain. This is something they do specific to Gunma, as Gunma has over 1000 natural hot springs. No other area of Japan comes close to that number. On the hike down, we took the normal trail that was mostly not covered in snow, so we didn’t need our snowshoes. We carried our shoes down the mountain and had cup ramen for lunch. After lunch, we stopped by a souvenir shop, mostly for the restrooms. I bought some miso ice cream and it was so savory! I was afraid to eat it, but I am so glad that I bought it. It was absolutely delicious. It was similar to salted caramel. I recommend you try it if you can. At that point, we hopped on a train (of course a train. JR sponsored it after all). Back in Takasaki station, they gave us Joetsu train line beer. I don’t drink beer, so I gave it to my husband. Some other people also don’t drink beer so they gave me theirs as well. I ended up with 5 bottles of beer. My husband said that it was good and that he liked it, so I guess that is nice.
It was a wonderful trip and I had a great time. I enjoyed meeting the people that I met. I love meeting people from other countries. This tour had people from all over the world. It was a lot of fun. I love Japanese culture and nature, and this tour was perfect as most of the things we did I had yet to experience. I appreciate the opportunity to have been a part of the Gunma Golden Guide trip. Thank you JR East for your wonderful sponsorship! If you ever get the chance to visit Japan, please come and check out Gunma. There are a lot of things to see. Most people only visit Tokyo, but I feel that if you limit yourself to only the big cities, you miss out on what true Japanese culture really is. There are city cultures, such as Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, and Okinawa, then there is Japanese culture, which you don’t really get to fully experience unless you distance yourself away from the cities. Please come to Gunma! |
AuthorJeny B Archives
August 2021
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