Thursday, December 20, 2007

Citizen Cabal


Last Thursday (and apparently ever since seeing as I'm still thinking about it hard enough to blog about it), the Cabal family had a HUGE reason to celebrate. Alvaro went to his scheduled United States citizenship exam and passed with a grade of 100%. He and I were under the impression that we would have to wait until March for the next swearing in ceremony. But lo and behold, he was told there would be a ceremony that afternoon and would he like to attend. So he calls me to see if I can leave work at 1:30 to go with him. His concern was that we have a list of about 25 people who have been telling us for two years that a big highlight in their life would be if they could attend Alvaro's citizenship ceremony. But since most of Alvaro's family are still in Colombia, we decided to attend the ceremony immediately so he could leave the country with his US passport if he needed to make an emergency trip to Colombia.

I figured it would be like running cattle through a line to get your certificate and then while everyone's children were running around Alvaro would say his oath of citizenship and then we'd all herd out. But boy was I wrong! It was an hour long ceremony in which I exhausted at least 6 tissues. A lady sitting in front of us, probably in her 80s, was so touched by the experience that I decided to shed a few tears of joy for her too.

Alvaro has been waiting to realize this dream since he was a young boy. He told his parents early on that he would be a United States citizen and he hasn't stopped his patient waiting through all the fingerprinting, documents and interviews since that time. Congratulations to my sweet husband and his love for both cultures making him who he is. We are richer because of our adoption of each other's countries and cultures.

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