Monday, November 23, 2009

Abundance



I went to Winco today ... Monday before Thanksgiving ... might not have been the wisest move. There were more people there than I had ever seen before. I marveled at the variety. There were old people, young people, people who looked like they had plenty of money, those who looked like they had much less, different ethnic backgrounds, but the one thing that everyone had in common was the ability to go up and down aisles filled with so much food ... and from the looks of it, buy what they needed and much of what they wanted. The abundance of our life is simply staggering.

It made me think of our child in Ethiopia. Since we are not asking for a baby, our child is alive right now .... somewhere ... If he/she is fortunate to be in the orphanage by now, then he probably will have food enough to fill his stomach tonight. If he or she is still living with their family, then they are probably living in desperate poverty ... and most likely will have known hunger and will continue to know it until they make it to the safety of the orphanage ... and ultimately our arms.

I am thankful for the abundance that we have been blessed with ... but sobered by the lack of so many.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

YAKIMA?



So, I'm sure Yakima, WA is a lovely town ... I may have even driven through it before (though I don't remember it), but I'm just wondering why it is the home of the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security's Citizenship and Immigration services office. Yep, that's where we had to send all of our paperwork for Immigration for our adoption. Which I did today!! Seems like Portland or Seattle might make a bit more sense. How many immigrants does Yakima really get? Just wondering.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

PAPERWORK PREGNANCY

For those of you have never adopted, I thought I'd give you a brief run-down of the process and where we are at so far ... and of course, as we are adopting internationally, I have no idea how it differs for a domestic adoption.

When you apply and are accepted by an agency, the paperwork pregnancy begins. There are 3 stages, and they can be worked on simultaneously. The first is the home study. This involves proving your financial stability, getting reference letters, letters from your employers, official copies of birth certificates, marriage certificate, police reports that say you don't have a criminal record or if you do, a letter explaining what happened, being interviewed by the social worker ... and since our kids are older, each of them had to be interviewed as well, as well as several other documents. Lots of details and all of them have to be done just right.

At the same time, you can be working on the dossier ... even more documents and almost all of these have to be notarized. So if you're thinking of adopting, I'd suggest making friends with a notary. (Thanks, Kevin!) Once the home study is complete, you can enter the 3rd stage which is Immigration. You have to send your home study, and application, $$, and eventually we will get fingerprinted and have the documents that we will need to enter the country legally with our child.

Once we get our documents back from Immigration, then we will combine that with the Dossier, and send all of that to our agency. They will work on it for a couple of weeks, and then it will be sent to Ethiopia for translation and submission to the government there. There are more details .. and I will probably laugh when we are done with how brief I made this, and how much I left out. There is still much to learn.

At some point once our dossier is complete and sent to the agency, we will receive our referral ... which is the picture and brief history of a child that we can choose to accept or not. Our age range is pretty broad, so I don't expect that we will not accept our first referral. Plus, we have a pretty strong faith that God has a child planned for us, so why would we turn one down that was recommended.

As to where we are at in the process right now? The answer is ... our home study is done. We will pick it up this week ... after we pay more $$. (Did I mention that international adoption is not cheap?) We will then send it off to immigration ... and then wait .... I'll keep you posted. And I'm planning on learning how to post pictures to this at some point. That might make this blog a bit more interesting.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

ORPHAN SUNDAY

Although I'm not doing a particularly good job of keeping up on this blog ... it is my intent to share our story but also to spread awareness of the needs of orphans worldwide. The videos below say it so well.

Orphan Sunday from Christian Alliance for Orphans on Vimeo.






We cannot help them all, but we can do something to help one. I'll be sharing more ideas for how to help in the future.