Preparing to Travel
Adoption is such a beautiful picture of our relationships with God. God individually chose Pete and I to be His children even before we accepted His free gift of love. God loved us so much that He positioned us in His family as equal to His own Son, Jesus Christ, with whom we share a Father, an inheritance, and an eternal future with God. So, we knew that if God ever presented the opportunity, we would jump at the chance to bring a child into our home, raise him as our own, and teach him how God the Father chose us.
Pete and I never dreamed that we would be presented with this awesome opportunity so young in our lives. We had imagined that we would have to wait 10-15 years before we would be financially capable of adopting. Nonetheless, when God put the thought into our minds, we started researching to see if God was opening a door for us. It was during this research (mostly on the internet) that we discovered Cathy Harris and the Independent Ukrainian Adoption Family Network (IUAFN). The costs of an independent adoption with the help of this organization was at least half of other types of international adoption. We also discovered A Child Waits Foundation which enabled us to finance most of our adoption costs.
Even though an independent adoption cost much less than other ways, it would still be a huge leap of faith for us to be able to spend half of Pete's yearly salary as a youth pastor. God realized our lack of faith and used various situations to prove to us that we could trust Him. We were convinced that God wanted us to adopt from Ukraine, but we had to convince United States Immigration and the Ukrainian government that we were qualified to do so. On November 17, 2000 we took the first tangible dive into the sea of paperwork required for an international adoption. Our I600A (Application for Advanced Processing of Orphan) was received and officially filed with U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) on December 1, 2000. The homestudy interview was on December 20, 2000, and everything was completed and submitted to INS on February 24, 2001. Chicago INS approved our request to adopt an orphan. We received their approval notice on March 12, only 2 weeks and 2 days after everything was submitted!!
On Wednesday, March 14 we went to Springfield to get our dossier authenticated
by IL Secretary of State. We copied the whole thing then sent it FedEx to my
parents who were visiting Washington D.C. and agreed to get Federal Stamps for
us on Friday. The dossier was then sent to Special Deliveries courier in Chicago
for them to take it to the Consulate General of Ukraine's office. Once the Consulate
General's office completed their authentications, the courier picked it up and
FedEx'd it to the National Adoption Center (NAC) in Ukraine. They received it
on Tuesday, March 27. Our facilitation team picked up the original at the NAC,
finished the translation, had it notarized, and resubmitted it. The NAC reviewed
our paperwork and notified our team of our approval.
While we were waiting for all this paperwork to be done, we did hours of research and asked ourselves many questions such as whether we should ask for a boy or girl. We knew that we could love either a boy or a girl. Since we already had a two-year old girl and more families adopting from Ukraine ask for girls, we decided to go find a son.
Now we were ready to go! We had our airline tickets, our bags were stuffed, our daughter was at her grandparents, and the days had been counted down. So began the journey to find our son!
Choosing Our Son
Up to this point, our journey to find a son included various forks in the road where we were forced to make choices. God always seemed to give us wisdom and worked through the circumstances to make it obvious which fork to follow. We had one major choice to make before we reached the point of actually choosing a child out of a roomful of other children.
The National Adoption Center in Kiev contains books of available children. Each
region has a set of books, and each child is represented by one page which includes
their name, birthdate, medical diagnosis, and usually a picture. Adoptive parents
page through these books and choose a child or set of children from one region
or orphanage to go visit.
Our facilitator helped us weed through the books pulling out the pages of younger
children as we saw them. As we reviewed them, we decided to visit the orphanage
with the most young children available - Lotikovo orphanage located in the region
of Slavianoserbsk in the province of Lugans'k.
When we finally reached Lotikovo on May 14, we were ushered into the orphanage director's office where we sat and waited for the caretakers to bring the available children. Three children walked in first. Our eyes were immediately drawn to one blonde boy, but he stopped short of the doorway and did not want to come in. A caretaker sat him on the couch next to her where he cowered with his head bowed and crocodile tears filling his chocolate-brown eyes.
The others gathered in front of us, and we all stared at each other as the director began giving their names, birthdates, and any major medical information. More caretakers brought 5-6 more children who were not yet walking. We were surprised to hear the ages of all these boys because they were so small and developmentally delayed when compared to our American-born babies who get good care and nutrition.
We narrowed our choice down to two three-year-old boys based on medical conditions we felt we could handle with our limited resources. The first boy, Atoly, was clever, explored the room, and interacted with us. But both of our hearts had been drawn to the scared little guy with chocolate-brown eyes. One of the caretakers placed him in Pete's lap where he huddled close to him. When we had narrowed our choice to the two, Pete started tickling the little guy in his lap. A smile and a dimple appeared, and then a little giggle escaped. Soon Pete was "chasing" a laughing little boy around the director's desk!
So how do we choose? We believe that God not only works through circumstances, but also through our feelings. God's arrangement of various cirucmstances brought us to this room with the choice of two boys in front of us. The only thing left to rely on was our hearts, and our hearts said, "Choose Ivan!" We believe that God led us to choose Ivan because He has something very special planned for him.
We
proceeded with the paperwork necessary to adopt Ivan and brought him home on
June 2, 2001. Ivan has adjusted amazingly well and has proved to be a loving,
obedient, fun-loving guy. He and his sister are fast becoming the best of friends.
We thank God for leading us to Cathy Harris and A
Child Waits Foundation who helped us bring
Ivan home
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