Our Adoption Adventure - Part Two

This is part two of our adoption adventure. If you haven't already, you can read part one, here.

Continuing on with Our Adoption Adventure.

When I left off, I was feelling a little doubtful about adding to our already large family.

During this time of doubt, Mrs. D. (from our adoption support group, see part one) stopped me walking into church on Sunday morning and handed me an Good Housekeeping article called, “Coming to America” written by Melissa Fay Greene about a brother and sister in Ethiopia who’s parents had died and had been adopted by a couple in America. I turned the page and my eyes fell onto two of the most beautiful Ethiopian children. I knew then, that this would be our country, our children would come, and they would come from Ethiopia. I went home and found another article by Ms. Greene Hope Lives Here which was actually a prequel to the article I was given. I was riveted; reading it only served to further my conviction that God wanted us to adopt from Ethiopia.

In the fall of 2005, there were only 5 agencies allowed to do adoptions from Ethiopia. I joined several Yahoo Groups and began reading comments and asking questions and researching our different options. We felt that it was important for the agency we chose to share the same faith and convictions as we have. We followed a link from Steven Curtis Chapman’s adoption website, Shaohannah’s Hope to Christian World Adoption.

While CWA's program in Ethiopia was new, they have a long record (over 15 years) of successful adoption stories. We felt comfortable that they were a Christian agency and we were pleased to learn that their child fees for their Ethiopia program had, at that time, been reduced in order to encourage the new Ethiopia programs. We decided to choose CWA as our agency and requested an application. And so before the new year began, we sent off our first chunk of money to CWA along with our application. We received notice that we had been accepted - we were on our way! So began our trek up Mt. Adoption Paperwork, someday soon we'll hopefully reach the summit.

Come back next time to read about our homestudy and about how we went from adopting one child to adopting two.