Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Smooth Sailing...kinda

Well, we have begun the home study/adoption process yet again. Everything was on hold for a few months as we have sought every viable possibility of us being able to adopt Oksana and Vitya. The lady doing our home study didn’t want to continue (I’m pretty sure she thinks that we’re crazy for being so psycho about these two kids) so we made calls, sent emails, and looked for any “connections” that could help us get those sweeties. Neither Jono nor I had felt a peace about their situation. Actually, I’ll be straight with you and admit that we still really don’t…but we want to. And that’s a step. There was a time when I was dead-set against feeling a peace about anyone being their mommy and daddy but us. But now I’m begging God to give it to me. He has taught me so much over the last few months about His holiness and sovereignty, and I can now fully apply that knowledge to this situation and trust Him to just do His thing. As I said, the peace isn’t there yet, but the trust is.
One of my Sunday School teachers when I was younger once told me that you just can’t wait until you know exactly what God wants you to do before you start moving. He said that it’s kinda like a boat…you can’t turn a boat that’s standing still. There has to be some forward momentum before the steering can begin (I am nautically ignorant, so I hope this analogy holds up.) And so sometimes you gotta just start moving on what you even kinda think God’s asking of you and then He has something to direct and guide. God reminded me of this lesson and was like, “Heather, quit trying to figure out all these details. Just start moving in general again.” Because, quite frankly, I was frozen. It felt like I was betraying O and V by moving on. And yet , doors were slamming in our faces left and right. So as we made the decision to get started again, Jono and I vowed that if EVER the time came when somehow we can get Oksana and/or Vitya, we will.
During all of this, Jono took some high school students on a mission trip to Curitiba, Brazil and met two little girls who melted his heart at an orphanage they visited. So as soon as he got home we started making calls to find out if their parents’ rights had been severed yet. It took a few months (Which is weird to me in the age of email and skype. I mean, we’re not sending telegrams here.), but we eventually found out that neither one was adoptable. Which put us in a very strange place. We had grown accustomed to pursuing children with whom we had a connection, and now we were out of connections. We didn’t know how to pick a country. Do you just look online and find where the cutest kids are? Or where it’s the cheapest or fastest to adopt from? Yeah, that all sounds pretty self-serving and disgusting, right?
Before we had found out that the little Brazilian girls were out of the question, we had discovered an adoption agency called One World Adoptions. After a few phone calls and emails, we fell in love with this agency and decided to get started on a home study. So when we were in that icky place of picking a program, a plan came to us. These people deal with a bunch of countries and orphanages, and they even go on mission trips to the various orphanages. So we decided that we would ask Susan, the director of OWA, where the worst conditions are and where the greatest need is. We felt like that left it open more to God’s preferences than to ours. Well, her answer was immediate and no questions about it…the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This is a fairly new program because there has been a 5 year civil war in this country, and about 15 years of craziness. There are so many children who are “true orphans” where both parents are deceased due to war or disease (mainly HIV). There are a lot of prenatal and childbirth issues that lead to mommies dying and leaving newborns. Many are also considered “social orphans” and their parents have abandoned them because they are unable to care for them. There is an estimated 4.2 million orphans in DRC.
So we have buckled down and got to work on getting our baby that God has for us home. After we told One World that if the Congo is where the need is, then the Congo is where we would go, they informed us that the timeline is like 6 MONTHS! That’s super crazy after having followed several of our friends adoptions from the Ukraine, Russia, and Brazil that took over a year. That’s not even the length of a pregnancy! But it’s all cool with me because I get antsy when things are drawn out and long anyway. Those who know me know that I work best under pressure and time crunches.
Our home study is almost finished, which we have decided that everyone should experience every now and then whether you’re adopting or not. My sister is actually doing all of the requirements that we do just to get caught up on little things like getting the septic tank pumped. Did you know you should do that every 5 years? And, apparently, a family of 5 like ours should do it every 3 years. We have new batteries in our smoke detectors, our weapons cache is safely stored away from the ammunition that would make it useful in the event of a break in, our dog is now guarded against rabies, and in 2 days all my babies will be vaccinated, inspected, and cleared to be brother and sisters to their new sibling. Next up, dossier.
One thing that everyone asks and you may be wondering is, “How old of a child are you gonna get and do you want a boy or a girl?” Well, because of the tremendous amount of orphans there and this being a fairly new program, there are infants up to teenagers available…as opposed to some programs where it’s harder to get younger children because that’s what everyone wants. So right now we are looking at a girl under 4. We will actually probably pursue two children. Sibling groups are rare in this country because they are abandoned one at a time and there is not quite the system of keeping track of relatives there that other countries have. But you can still adopt 2 unrelated children.
I realize that this post is getting excruciatingly long, so I will save issues like “How we’re raising money” and “Promise 686 Rocks” and “The Long’s Summer Project of studying up on the Congo” for future posts. But I will ask that you talk to God on our behalf and our Congolese child’s behalf. The boat is moving and God has guided us in a direction that we never saw coming.!!