Tag: Adoption Page 17 of 24

Chosen

On April 26, 2011

We stared at pictures of little girls and prayed all week. I had emailed the orphanage director with some questions about the children, but due to an email mix-up, we weren’t in communication with her until last night, when we returned from Kenya.

We knew there were three children at Forever Angels that met our specifications (girl, about 2 years old) who were available to adopt. We narrowed it down to two, mostly based on age.

Long about Thursday I asked Gil who he was leaning towards. He told me. She was the same one on my mind.

But it was torturous thinking, honestly. I read this post by the orphanage director on Friday. She wrote about how on that day, they had to transfer two of their beautiful four-year-olds to another orphanage, since Forever Angels only cares for babies and toddlers. Both these little girls were available for adoption. No one took them. Now, most likely, they will spend their whole childhood in an orphanage.

So though I was leaning towards one child in particular as being the best fit for our family, I was haunted by the faces of the others, who could very likely never join families. One child to gain a life of hugs, bedtime stories, an excellent education, a brother and sister, grandparents, and cousins, Disneyland, ticklefests, and toys she will always call her own, and the other child never truly belonging to anyone.

Some people have asked us why we are choosing a toddler this time, instead of a baby. The simple answer to that is that the older a child gets, the less likely he or she will be chosen. Since we’ve already had a baby girl and a baby boy, we decided to choose the oldest child we could and still preserve the “birth order” in our family.

We’d pretty much made our choice, and then last night we heard from the orphanage director. She told us that one of the two little girls we were considering is being pursued for adoption by one of her Tanzanian staff members.

But not the one we had chosen.

Praise the Lord! Not only can we rejoice in the little girl who will join our family, but we can rejoice that the other little one will get a family as well. Just as it should be.

Now….not to disappoint anyone…but we’re still not revealing her identity. There is still a lot of paperwork to be done, and things can go wrong. We’re not even telling our kids who she is until we are as sure as we can be that we will be bringing her home. However, if you want to go through all 49 profiles on the website and try to figure it out, go for it! My mom did, actually (of course), and interestingly enough, God put on her heart the same little girl we had chosen.

And when will we bring her home? Well, when we were at this point with Grace, it took another 4 months (which was very unusual). With Josiah, it took another 6 weeks. It has been a lot faster for some people, but we’ve learned not to get our hopes up too high. We’re hoping for a month. Soon!

Box 70027

By Amy Medina

On April 18, 2011

In Other

In all my eight years living in Tanzania, I have never once checked the mail.

We use HOPAC’s mailing address: P.O. Box 70027, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The box is way downtown and is checked by a staff member once a week or so, and all the mail brought to school.

I have written that address on countless applications, letters, and forms. But I had never actually seen the mailbox.

Until yesterday.

Last week, after hounding the social worker with my phone calls and texts, she finally told me that she had mailed our approval letter. I didn’t totally believe her, but was still optimistic. When we returned from the Morogoro orphanage trip on Wednesday, I rushed to the staff room to check our cubby holes. Magazines. No letter.

Richard is the guy who checks Box 70027 these days. On Friday, I hounded him. “Will you pleeeeease check the mail today?” I begged. Spring break was starting; we were leaving the country to visit Kenya, and I didn’t want to wait another week and a half to know if our letter had come. “I’ll try,” he told me.

At 6:00 that evening, we were at school for an event and Richard drove up. “I didn’t make it,” he told me. “Traffic was too bad.” And how could I blame him when he got back so late?

But I was determined. “Is there any way I could get the mailbox key and check it myself?” So we went into the office and he helped me hunt for the spare key. Eureka.

I would have driven down the very next day, but I knew it would take me four hours round trip. So I decided I could wait one more day, because we were going to the airport for our trip to Kenya, and could stop at the post office on the way.

So we did. And I found Box 70027 for the first time. Sifted through the crammed mailbox and found the glorious sight of a slim brown envelope with my name on it.

It was there! Oh happy day!

We’ve been approved! It’s there, in writing…finally, after all these months.

However, there was a big surprise. Throughout this whole past year, our social worker has insisted that we could not choose the child. We could give specifications, and even choose the orphanage, but we could not choose the child. We were totally fine with that. In fact, we preferred it.

So you can imagine our surprise when we found that the letter stated that we were to have a girl, around 2 years old, from Forever Angels Orphanage in Mwanza. But we are to choose.

We will make the decision this week, based on pictures and prayer alone. We’ll then be about a month away from bringing her home. Praise God with us, and then pray!

Orphans and Former Orphans

By Amy Medina

On April 15, 2011

In Adoption

Service Emphasis Week (SEW) has got to be one of the very best things about HOPAC. This year secondary students spread out all over Tanzania on 17 different teams…to build water filters, run kids’ camps, teach English, serve disabled people, teach computer classes…and the list goes on.

Gil led the team that went to Agape Children’s Village in Morogoro, a city about 3 hours from here. So the kids and I joined him, and we took 12 HOPAC students to serve the 28 kids there for 5 days.

Love these trips. The students step up. In leadership. In love. In service. The kids shower their adoration on these teenagers who are willing to give of themselves to them. It’s beautiful to watch.

Visiting orphanages is not a new thing for me. But visiting them with my two children, who were once orphans, was quite a profound experience. In each child’s face, I saw the faces of my children. Neither of my children came from this orphanage, but if they had not been adopted, they would have grown up much the same way.

I often imagined Grace there, as a resident, not a visitor. Her head shaved, instead of full of braids and beads. Eating ugali with her hands instead of a spoon. Her eyes with a yellow tinge from malnutrition or too many bouts of malaria. Speaking only Swahili. Helping to wash her clothes by hand, making her little bed in the morning, and putting away her meager possessions.

Would she still be as full of life? As confident as she is now? As gregarious? Would she love to laugh as much as she does in our family? How different would she be without a mama, her Daddy, her brother? How would her mind be different without the plethora of experiences she has had…if her whole life revolved around three buildings and a nearby school?

She would be such a different person that I don’t know if I would recognize her. Yet that person could have been, if not for the sovereign hand of God in her life. And millions of children in Tanzania are living that life. The differences are stark.

And yet….what would I be like, had I not been adopted into His family?

Babies, Con’t

By Amy Medina

On March 11, 2011

In Other

Good news on all fronts.

Stella: She is at 30 weeks. She is somewhat anemic but otherwise healthy. Her doctor still has not admitted her to the hospital, but he is optimistic she will make it to full-term. She lost the other babies somewhere around 32 weeks. Please keep praying.

The Medinas: I finally connected with Mama A this week, after two other attempts to see her.

Happiness #1: She has received Mama S’s homestudy report. I saw it with my own two eyes, which was exciting since I still wasn’t entirely sure it even existed. It looked extremely thorough. Should be, since it took six months to write.

Happiness #2: Mama A didn’t say anything about needing an International Report. Hoping it stays that way.

Happiness #3: She was in a good mood.

Happiness #4: We should just be waiting for final approval now. That approval letter will also give us the name of a child–our little girl. At the advice of our lawyer, we have not requested a particular child, but only a gender and age. However, Mama A did ask me about our preference for orphanages.

Could be two weeks; could be two months…two years. But she’s coming!

If You Could

By Amy Medina

On February 7, 2011

In Other

If you could choose the gender of your next child, would you?

What about if you could space the births of your children in exactly the way you choose? Or if you could pick out your child’s temperment? Even their looks?

Would you?

I suppose that with genetic engineering, some of that is already happening. And how do we respond? That’s God’s category! we say. Don’t mess with God! And we admit God knows what He is doing, right? Because if we could make our families the way we wanted, we would probably screw it up. Right? Of course right.

But what if the choice was there, and if you didn’t choose, a government worker who doesn’t know you did the choosing for you? Chose your child’s gender, birthday, looks, temperment, etc? Would you choose then, because you would say to yourself, Well, if someone has to choose, then it had better be me.

What would you do?

Trust me. It feels really, really weird.

In Grace’s case, we didn’t have an specifications. We told our lawyer, “Any child under a year.” She is the one who matched us up with Grace. In Josiah’s case, we asked for a boy. Social welfare gave us the name of an orphanage. They told us, “Go pick.” There were five baby boys under a year. And yes, it was weird.

And now we are here again. Social welfare this time has told us, “Pick the orphanage; we’ll pick the child.” But we all know that it’s quite possible we can “suggest” a particular child, and that’s who we’ll get.

How do you pick a child out of 2 million who need a family? How do you take one and leave the rest? How do you choose knowing that you will profoundly change the child’s life, and your life, forever? It feels like playing God. We’re not supposed to pick our children. Children are God’s gifts; we get who He gives us and we love those we get. Yet since we can pick, shouldn’t we? Since we have a choice, then of course we’re going to think about gender and how we want to space our children’s ages. So that narrows it down….what then?

I will go to the district office on Thursday. I will tell her which orphanage we want; and most likely I will tell her a Name. Maybe two or three, and let them choose.

Weirdness. Pray for us. With both of our kids, we saw God’s hand of Sovereignty in placing them in our family. Will you pray that He does it again? Because of course, we believe that no matter who does the “choosing,” ultimately it is God who decides.