Yes, I realize it is has
been AGES since I wrote anything about what is happening with Our Girl. Reality is very little is happening. So, let me tell you about the very little
first. We were approved on March 20 to
start paperwork with Our Agency and to get a Homestudy Agency in OK, where we
live (Our Agency is not in our state so we have to have a separate agency do
our homestudy). Within about 2 weeks we
had filled out all of the initial policy paperwork for both agencies. Currently the Homestudy Agency is requesting
reference letters and doing background checks and Our Agency is processing the
paperwork we sent. We have our dossier
instructions (a dossier is the application to the other country) from Our
Agency. We have not started on this yet
because some of it will overlap with the homestudy paperwork we need to
collect. So, at this point we are
waiting for the Homestudy Agency to send us the next set of paperwork so we can
do both sets of paperwork simultaneously (to avoid multiple trips to various places
for duplicate copies of paperwork).
Another tidbit of
information is that in exactly 2 months from right now I will be on a plane to
Ethiopia on a mission trip! And most
importantly (at least to me right now) is that in 2 months and 3 days I will
see Our Girl! Jeff and I have talked
about that moment. I wonder how it will
play out. What will I do? What will I say? Will I cry?
What will she do? Oh, the
anticipation is KILLING ME!
So, that’s what’s been
going on currently. Now let me take you
back to December (4 months ago).
December 9, 2012 we were
given the go ahead from the Director of the Orphanage in Ethiopia that Our
Girl’s sister agreed to relinquish her to us for adoption. At this point we needed to find an agency
willing to work with us. This might not
sound like a big deal, but, well, it is.
You see usually adoptions take one of two routes. 1) You choose an agency, then choose a child
– or are matched with a child that is in an orphanage affiliated with that
agency. Or 2) You use a variety of
search possibilities to identify a waiting child, inquire of that agency about
that child, then choose to work with that agency.
Then there’s us, we did
not follow either of these two routes (note we did #1 when we adopted
Eli). You see Our Girl is at a private
orphanage. This means the Orphanage is
not affiliated with any adoption agency.
So we had to find an agency willing to work with an orphanage with whom
they do not have any prior relationship.
And so, yea, most agencies are not willing to do this.
So, what then?
Well, I ended up
contacting two people through Facebook that I knew had adopted recently to see
what ideas they might have. One of them,
Joely contacted me back. She didn’t have
any direct information on an agency, but she did put me in contact with one of
her Facebook friends, JoLynn. So, I
contacted JoLynn. It turns out JoLynn
and her family are the in process of adopting two boys from Ethiopia through a
private orphanage (a different one than Our Girl is at). And they found an agency willing to help them
do this. In addition, JoLynn had
recently been to Ethiopia (October 2012) and she went with a few other ladies,
one of whom was Heather. So, I contacted
Heather through Facebook. It turns out,
she too was adopting a child from a private orphanage… but hold only your seat…
it was the Orphanage where Our Girl was!
Even more astounding JoLynn and Heather had been at the Orphanage in
October! To make things even more cool,
it also quickly became clear that I met MJ (Heather’s daughter at the
Orphanage) when I was there last May!
Can you say “WOA!”? ‘Cause that
was what I was saying!
Okay, so both women
suggested the same agency and I contacted the Agency the following day. I should note that this is not an agency I
had ever heard of before, but they seemed friendly when I called. They told me it might take a week or two to
look into if they would be willing and able to help us. (That time frame actually turned into 3
months, but they were very professional and helpful as we waited on the
information to arrive back from Ethiopia.)
Now there is one more
CRAZY connection here to share. The day
after I contacted Our Agency I received a phone call at my office from someone
I had never met. Her name was Janae. She had been sent my way by a wife of one of
the dean’s at my school, Trisha. I
didn’t know Trisha too well then (we’ve since become friends), but Trisha knew
Janae through homeschooling and me through my University. The reason that Trisha connected us was that
Janae also had a son, Levi, from Ethiopia, and he was right at Eli’s age. So, we had a nice conversation about our boys
and adoption, etc. She had also heard
about us starting a second adoption. So,
she asked us what agency we were using.
I told her and… did you guess it?... it was the agency they had used,
only months earlier to bring their son home!
INCREDIBLE! I had never even
heard of Our Agency and God sent a family my way who had used them to bring
home their son.
So, God put me in touch
with people I have never met via social media to introduce me to an adoption
agency I had never heard of and then confirmed that agency through another
adoptive parent, that again, I had never met.
Yea, God’s pretty awesome like that.
J I’m sitting here even as
a type shaking my head with a big goofy grin on my face, wondering how God’s going to pull this all
together. I mean, so far it has really
just been crazy, incredible the connections He has made to bring us to this
point.
And that is the story of
how we found Our Agency to bring home Our Girl!
