Day 3 - It's been a blur
October 5, 2022
It was probably a cliffhanger to leave off our last post with no updates. Really going to keep this brief relative to how much has happened since we're all exhausted and have not had much time to absorb everything. And the jet lag is real... I'll try and get out a longer post when we have a little free time. That might be 24 or 36 hours from now.
We landed in Chennai yesterday morning. Made it through immigration and customs without too much difficulty. And then met up with Anu, who works for our agency. She is based in New Delhi but travels with families when they request help. By the way, she's awesome. So helpful in navigating the process and everything else.
From there we took a 4ish hour car ride to Tiruvannamalai. It's beautiful and tropical (i.e. hot and humid). There's a large mountain (extinct volcano I read) that the city is built around. We got to our hotel, napped for about an hour, and then rode over to the orphanage. The real surprise was that after only a brief visit they told us we could take Anandhi with us. Though we still need her passport before we can leave the city. We expected to visit a handful of times before we could take custody of her. So we came back to the hotel and started figuring
out life as a family of four. Plenty more details, updates, and photos coming but we've been just taking it all in.
We're going to head back to Chennai tomorrow to "plead our case" to the passport officials and try to get the passport handed to us, or at least delivered to us in Chennai instead of having to drive it all the way to Tiruvannamalai. We'll see how that all goes, but we're going to stay in Chennai for a few days and hope we're persuasive. Still hoping we can get to New Delhi early next week, and then home a few days after that.
-Ryan, Leah, Ravi, and Anandhi
