It's Official! (by Thom)

It's Official! Today we returned from Segou and our meetings with the judge. A lot happened and it was more complicated than we expected but that was mostly due to language difficulties. Actually, there was a miscommunication between the social worker and the judge and that escalated when the judge tried to tell us certain obligations that were "news" to us. To make a very long story short: we ended up not resolving things on Thursday and were obligated to come back the next day and things were finalized this morning. Wassa and Foune Dembele are now officially and legally Miriam Ruth & Hannah Marie McMurray. Praise be to the Lord for seeing us through this very stressful time! After driving a lot of miles and dealing with all sorts of legal translation from French and unexpectedly staying in a -2 star hotel I'm beyond exhaustion this evening.
Thanks for the prayers throughout this process. Our next steps include getting Malian passports for the girls and getting visas to the US so we can return as scheduled March 1st for three months. Somewhere along the way we need to work on getting them US passports as well. It's important to us to get the girls duel citizenship.
Here's a picture of our (now official) family taken shortly before Christmas:

(Thom is holding Miri and Amanda's with Hannah)