How we got to Haiti

My friend, Kathy, who is also adopting from FHG recently posted their answer to this question. I've always had a shortened version of our answer on the side of my blog but reading her response made me think maybe I should tell the long answer too.

The truth is, after I returned from Romanian orphanages my sophmore year of college, I knew I was supposed to adopt. God had placed me in that situation and allowed me to be a first hand witness to an international adoptive family through my best friend's family. Those experiences shaped my heart into something that felt compelled to act on the behalf of those who didn't have a family. I met D at school right after my Romania trip, we started to date, and as things got more serious, we talked about marriage and family and kids. Adoption came up and he was okay with adoption. We then married, finished school, and got our first real jobs but weren't really ready to have kids yet. (At least I wasn't.)

In the fall of 2003, we decided to start looking into adoption. I was 100% sure that we would use a specific agency within our state to do a domestic adoption. This agency does the adoption essentially for free. We attended the first information session they had for all potential families and were very excited at the prospect of jumping into the adoption pool. Then we met with our case worker. We were told that because we were not infertile, the agency did not feel like we would have a good chance of being selected by expecting mothers. We were told that if we really wanted to help children then we could perhaps host a Christmas party for poor children. Needless to say, I cried for the last part of our meeting and we went home devestated.

We didn't know what to do next because the only two choices that seemed available were international adoption and a domestic infant adoption through another agency. Both options were equally expensive. And I swore when I left Romania, I would not do an international adoption because of the way the government took money from adoptive families but then provided sub standard care for the children.

In the spring of 2004, we were contacted by Health and Human Services, asking us if we'd like to do foster parent training. We decided to try it with the belief that we could maybe start our family by adopting through foster care. We specified that we would consider doing respite care for familes who needed a few days off or we would be an adoption only family for a child or sibling set, boy or girl, aged 0-6. We attended the training, went to the conferences, and waited. We received no calls for children. We got online and looked at available children in other states' foster care systems. We put in many phone calls with only one response which was not even a serious response.

We finally received a call from our local case worker in October of 2005, asking us if we would take a 6 year old girl in an emergency placement. We knew we would have her for probably less than 1 month but possibly for longer. The initial information we were given was that this was not an adoption situation. This did not fit what we really wanted but we had been waiting so long, we decided to try it and see if maybe full time foster care was what God intended for us.

Lee'la stayed with us for a little over a month. It was hard. She was a very sweet little girl who missed her mama more than anything. But D and I were both ill prepared for foster care. Our training did not really give us insight into what to expect in terms of her grief and confusion nor did it provide us with insight into how we might feel. We had no problem parenting/disciplining; we had huge problems loving. And we felt guilty about it. I was working full time as was D and we took no time off. The two of us plunged into caring for a stranger, into this glorified babysitting experience. Please don't think I'm ragging on foster care. I'm not. It was just not right for us. We wanted a child who would forever be a part of our family. We were not prepared for our own attachment feelings. We did not have realistic expectations of what it would be like. I don't regret our decision to take Lee'la in for a minute. She got to see through D what a loving man is like, something she had never seen before. And the last day she stayed with us, she asked me to tell her about Jesus dying on the cross. But we knew, foster care was not for us.

In the spring of 2006, we received another call from our caseworker. This time, she wanted us to consider being adoptive parents for two sisters who were 4 and 6. We went to their foster home, met them, watched them for an hour or so by ourselves, and went home. I cried the whole way home because I knew they weren't our kids. After that, we decided to stop actively pursuing a fos adopt situation.

We didn't know what to do. Maybe we heard wrong? Maybe we were supposed to be having our own kiddos? Maybe we weren't supposed to have kids? We were totally lost. So we just decided to do nothing. To just wait and live life and do our best to be obedient. Our church was planning a mission trip to Peru in the summer of 2006 and it was something that used our gifts and passions so we decided to go.

We traveled to Peru to do sports camps and a VBS type ministry and some street evangelism. We both came back feeling like we should start planning to go somewhere the next summer, 2007. We returned to the US on August 6, a Saturday. We were in church on the 7th, listening as a missionary began sharing about Haiti. And we decided to pray about going to Haiti in the summer of 2007 as part of a mission trip.

So pray we did. I also started looking at adopting from Haiti. A high school friend had adopted from FHG and the orphanage had been recommended to us a few years back but we basically ignored that information. Besides at that time, we weren't old enough. So I started looking again at the FHG website. Then, I asked D to start praying about adopting from there. And, eventually, we decided we should try. We mailed our application to FHG in October of 2006. Shortly after this, Kenson's picture was posted on their website. I had wanted to let the FHG administrators choose our child but D really felt like it was Kenson. So we requested to become his adoptive parents.

And that's it. That's how we got to where we are. The coolest part? Kenson's birthday. He was born August 6; we started praying about Haiti on August 7. The other cool part. His birthday is my birthday too. I think that's one of the reasons he stuck out to D. Conleigh came about later as a family began advocating for her online. D and I both noticed their postings and then we started praying about her. But that's our story, one with lots of detours and some real craziness and some real heartache. But oh the things we've seen, and done, and heard, and felt.