Questions Answered

Yesterday we received our notice that USCIS had received our I 600 A (the petition you must file with immigrations to begin the process to gain approval to adopt an orphan from another country). It will still be awhile before we receive notice about our fingerprinting appointments from USCIS (we have to travel to Charlotte for those). We are hoping for appointments some time in July. Our progress has been slow this week, but we are remaining steady. We were able to get our criminal background checks for our homestudy, Sean got his physical exam (I had mine back in April), and we both received our statements from our doctor regarding our overall health (which has to be redone because the notary's commission expires in August). I had a reaction to one of the two vaccinations I received, which thankfully was only a local reaction (although my arm has hurt all week). I'm hoping the rest of my vaccinations go smoothly.

Ciara continues to pray for her brother and sister, although we have just requested one. She is remaining firm that she is getting a sister, but we repeatedly explain to her that it is about who God has planned for us as a family. Which brings me to answering the many questions we have received--do you know if it will be a boy or a girl, when do you think you will get them, do you have to travel, and why on earth Ethiopia? First of all, Sean and I spent a lot of time discussing and praying about whether to specify a boy or a girl. In the end, we are standing by faith that God is sovereign and completely in control, and we would much rather He decide how to build our family than the two of us. Statistically speaking, there are more boys available for adoption, but there have been a number of prayers offered up for a little sister, so we will all have to wait and see who God is/has created for our family. I'll answer the next two questions together. No, we don't have to travel to Ethiopia, but we want to. Ethiopia is one of the countries that allows families to have the child escorted back to the US. However, we both feel strongly that we need to have some time to experience our child's birth country, their customs and culture, their people, to see the orphanage where our child stayed, etc. We know in the long run that all of this will be important for those questions that our child will have later in life. Our agency has never had (according to the person that we talked with) a family request to meet any of the birth family, but we are hoping and praying that this will be a possibility for us. We realize all to clearly that with extreme poverty and disease, we may only have one opportunity to meet our child's birth family and to gain some valuable information for him/her. As far as when we may travel, Ethiopian adoptions can take anywhere from 6-8 months. We submitted all of our initial paperwork on May 10, 2007, so we are hoping to travel somewhere around the end of this year or the beginning of 2008. Generally, it takes about 3-4 months to complete your homestudy, dossier, get your passports, etc. After that, it is about 1-2 months until you get a referral, then you accept or reject the referral, a court date is set, and you typically travel about 2-4 weeks after your court date. Of course, with international adoptions, there are all sorts of events that can take place to slow down or halt the process. Lastly, given that our first adoption was a domestic adoption, many people have asked why Ethiopia? I don't think that either one of us can state 100% why, but it is more like we can't say no. We both feel that in the US, an agency will be able to find a family for an infant regardless of race or other conditions. We simply aren't ready to do foster care due to Ciara's age and that reunification with the birth family is the goal of foster care (at least in NC). For the past year, we have kept checking into adoptions from Ethiopia. The more we have learned, the more our hearts have been drawn to the children of this country. For us, the reality that adoption for many of them may be the difference between life and death really hit us hard. We realize that with 4-5 million orphans (some sites state more), one child won't make much of a difference, but it certainly will for that child and so our journey began.