Jackie Danicki

One of the people I really enjoyed meeting yesterday at CJU was Steve Winterhalter, an American guy who’s been working for Commission Junction in London for about a year. After he and I had been talking for quite a while about blogs, with me telling him about the book I am writing about how social media changes lives, Steve said, “Yeah, I have a blog.” He said it so casually that I was caught a little off-guard when he explained to me what it was about.

Have a look at The Jewel of Kazakhstan, the blog that Steve and his wife Wendy kept as they went through the process of adopting their baby daughter in Kaz while living in London and going through a US agency. Yes, that’s the bureaucratic nightmare it sounds like, and then some:

This last phase of the adoption process has been like managing a developing world project; policing required at every step. We’ve lost packages in the black postal hole between the US and the UK. (No one knows where the international mail goes or where it comes from. Rumor has it, it may even route through Canada.) We’ve schlepped to the US Embassy in Downtown London 4 times to notarize documents, and once more to get more pages in my passport, which instead involved getting a whole new passport. We’ve shuffled money through various friends and family members just to get our dollars into our hands. On a given day, just to check up on things, I’ll email my “friends” Patrick at the State Dept, chat with Marie and Patty at the FBI and make a friendly call to the sheriff’s office in Santa Barbara. Then I call my bud, Eldo, at Golden Rule Travel, to organize yet another travel time schedule. (We’re now on travel date change No. 3. )

Their daughter has been with them for about three months now, and the smile on Steve’s face and the sparkle in his eyes when he talks about his little girl (Kira means ‘light’ in Kazakh) is a wonderful thing to see. What a great story - and a gem of a blog.

Filed under: Blogging, Children, Happiness, Life, People I Know