Our trip to Cambodia Sept. 2008 to visit the girls and find out about Adoption options

We spent a month in September 08 visiting Sopheap's neices Leap, Lai and Leak. We traveled to Phnom Penh, Kampong Som/ Sihanoukville, and back to our village near Kampong Cham. We met with Cambodian and US officials trying to figure out the bureaucracies and what options there are to adopt our parentless nieces. Since the girls live with their grandmother and don't live in an ophanage (thank God!) the Cambodian government doesn't consider them ADOPTABLE through normal means... Since they are not our biological children the US government doesn't recognize them as ours. So we are trying to figure out how we can legally make them our children and bring them home to be with us in Alaska.

Here are some pictures of our time spent with our girls. It was a wonderful chance to visit with them and get them motivated to study english more, (and get them working on better dental hygiene!!), plus we built some nice memories together. Leaving them behind was heart wrenching and our inability to get answers and a definitive plan / schedule for bringing them home makes it all the more stressful. As you can see from the picts, they are very wonderful kids.