Why adopt? Why Ethiopia? The VERY short answer is this: God opened our eyes to the orphan crisis and burdened our hearts to act, so we did.
I have so much on my heart to share. I hope that I can formulate it all into words for you to understand. :-) When I become very passionate about something I love to share it with others. Just ask my friends, or my mom, or my husband...they'll tell you. It's just who I am...something about me. I have to tell you though that I've never been so passionate about something as I am about adoption...whoa, you better stand back people! I am in love with adoption. It's brilliant, it's wonderful, it's biblical...and I've never even completed an adoption yet but I am convinced of these things. Why you ask? Well, because God adopted us as His sons and daughters. God loves adoption. God commands us to care for the orphans and widows. God does this very same thing with each and every one of us. We are not "blood related" to God, we did not choose Him to be our Father - he chose us, He searches us out to be His sons and daughters...chases after us, and it's difficult, all because He loves us and wants us to be His own. This is adoption and this is why I love it.
So why are we adopting? I'm going to list some reasons why...obviously some are more important than others.
* Primarily, we believe God called us specifically to adopt.
* We believe that God loves adoption and commands us to care for the orphan.
* We are excited to give a child the opportunity to know & experience God's love for them, when they otherwise might not ever have the chance to learn about Him.
* There are 147 million orphans in the world...147 million!!! And now we can say MINUS 1!!! I think more and more are saying "minus 1" now so hopefully that number is dropping dramatically.
* Because if roughly 6% of the born again Christians in the world adopted we could care for all the adoptable orphans in the world...that is amazing! Now not all of these 147 million orphans are able to be adopted, but this statistic is for the ones that are.
* We desire more children but I don't necessarily desire to be pregnant again.
* We would love a daughter. We started to hear the call to adopt before we even had our second son and would be perfectly content with a house full of boys, but if we can choose, we are excited to have a girl!
* We know that this adoption is going to bless us way more than it will our daughter. I do know that it will bless her, but we are already experiencing blessings and we are barely into this process...I can't wait to see what other blessings will come as a result.
Why did you choose international adoption instead of domestic? And why did you then choose Ethiopia? Let me say that these are just the reasons that WE chose to adopt internationally through Ethiopia. We think domestic adoptions are just as special, but this is where our calling took us and some of the reasons why.
* We have heard too many stories of birth parents changing their minds in domestic adoptions and then the adoptive parents (us) not getting any of the money back that had already been spent. We wanted to go the most secure route (at least in our minds) to adopt our daughter. It would have been devastating to us if we did not have the money to "try again" after a failed attempt.
* In most international adoptions, the birth parents are not involved (of course not always the case) and therefore the risk of them changing their minds is very low. We do know that there is always a risk of the country closing adoptions, but there are risks with any adoption. And let me say that we would love the opportunity to meet our daughter's parents if given the chance! I think that would be invaluable for us and for her one day.
* We looked at almost every country you can look at to adopt from. Our first thought was Asia since we had such fond memories associated with Thailand. We found Asian adoptions to be long, difficult and expensive, and several countries we were interested in were closed. We then looked at Haiti, but found out the excruciating wait after receiving a referral could be up to 2-3 years or more...they have an extremely corrupt government and it makes me so sad for those children.
* A friend from high school had just received a referral from her Ethiopian adoption and so we started to explore that idea. Honestly, Africa was the last place I wanted to adopt from. I was afraid...afraid of raising a strong black woman in the United States, afraid of the risk of HIV/AIDS in our daughter, I didn't know much about the country or how long it took to get there, and I realized I had this unnecessary fear of Africa for some reason. I was just very uninformed...God calmed my fears and all of a sudden it just felt like it was right. Isn't that funny how God does that? "Anything but Africa God!!!" And God's like, "Okay, how about Africa???" :-)
* We considered Ethiopia and Rwanda. Because of travel rules, we decided on Ethiopia. It has one of the fastest, smoothest adoption programs out there and they only required one trip. The key here being requirED. As of last week, Ethiopia has changed that rule. We now have to take two trips...this is part of the roller coaster ride of adoptions I am finding out. I was devastated to find out that I'll have to leave my children twice, fly over there twice, pay twice the travel expenses, meet and LEAVE my daughter and then go back to get her a few months later. Excruciating. But we'll do what we have to do...if they change it to 4 trips we'll just take 4 trips.
* And of course we met all of the requirements for Ethiopia and every single country has different requirements...a lot of which we did not meet.
* Watch the adoption video on our "announcement" post for a lot of statistical reasons why we chose Ethiopia. There is a HUGE need there with a lot of children being abandoned simply because if their mothers tried to take care of them, one of them would die from lack of food.
So there you go. That is what I'm going to leave you with for now. I have more to say on other things...part of it being our particular journey to this point. Our prayer is that we will be bringing our daughter home about a year from now. She should be between 6-12 months old when she comes home. I would love for you to leave questions you have in the comments. We want to be as open about this as we can and I'd love to answer your questions.
For now, I will be praying for everyone who is reading this. I know that not everyone is called to adopt but I know that some of you reading this are or will be. Some of you have felt that tug when you hear about adoption or see the orphans on television or hear about the poverty. Some of you love to read adoption blogs...maybe the Lord is telling you something as well. Just pray about it...I used to feel those tugs and I ignored them for a long time. I told myself that I couldn't love a child that wasn't "mine", that we couldn't afford it, that it was for other people but not me, but the Lord didn't give up on me. He kept tugging on my heart for years and years until He finally got through little by little. Yes, there are a lot of orphans in the world and yes, the number is staggering, but I have hope knowing that for now I through God can make a life-changing difference for ONE...and who knows the ripple effect that it may have. I am praying that it is HUGE.
