My husband and I are the proud parents of eleven children. Of these children,
nine have been classified as special needs, and seven are adopted. We have recently
begun the adoption of two more special needs children, numbers twelve and thirteen,
and anxiously await their arrival.
In addition to adopting special needs children ourselves, we are also the founders of a non-profit ministry called The Shepherd's Crook that seeks to help find adoptive families for special needs or waiting orphans. In January of 2001, I was researching financial assistance possibilities for some of the families who were struggling to raise the funds for the adoption of children in our program. Like us, most of our families are able to provide all that is needed to raise adopted children, but do not have the thousands of dollars necessary to pay for the very expensive adoptions. I eventually connected with Cynthia Nelson and had a lovely phone conversation with her, discussing the assistance programs that A Child Waits makes available. She happened to mention that she had an adopted daughter from Romania. This was of particular interest to me personally, because at that time we had been trying for almost a year to get a baby girl, born with spina bifida, out of Romania. We had not even been able to officially begin her adoption process because of a moratorium on adoptions in Romania. Cynthia suggested that I contact Nicole Baila who had helped her with her own daughter's adoption. We did so and in a matter of weeks, Nicole was able to get things finally rolling with our daughter's adoption. Suddenly we needed funds.
As I said, we had been trying for almost a year at that time to get our daughter home. Because she was in need of medical care not available in Romania, we even tried bringing her to the United States on a medical visa, but because of some paperwork mistakes made in Romania, this became impossible. We had fought discouragement for many months and ridden the emotional roller coaster up and down as possibilities and hopes fell through one after another. We had sometimes wondered if we would ever be able to bring this child home. Meanwhile, she had fought and won many battles in her short life - abandonment, neglect, surgery, and multiple illnesses in a third world hospital. We had chosen the name Carlin Jessica for her because it means, "little champion beheld by God." She had continued to fight, and we knew that we could never give up, either. Now it looked like our dream just might come true. We couldn't bear the thought that lack of money might now stand between us and this precious one. God had miraculously provided all the funds that we needed for each of our previous adoptions and we knew we could trust Him to provide again.
We learned that the agency Nicole was working with had worked in the past with families who used A Child Waits to help with some of their adoption costs. So we wrote a letter explaining our family's story and applied. We were thrilled to learn that we were approved for $5000. This meant that we could truly move forward with our daughter's adoption. On December 18, 2002, we brought two year old Carlin Jessica home after a 22 month battle to complete her adoption. An American neurosurgeon had traveled to Romania and donated surgery on Carlin's spinal cord when she was only three months old, and because of this gift, Carlin was able to walk. But we knew that there could still be other undetected problems associated with her spina bifida. We immediately began a battery of tests when we got her home. We also began noticing within weeks of her homecoming that she seemed to be losing some function in her legs. Tests revealed that her bladder was no longer functioning, resulting in the need for us to catheterize her four times daily to prevent kidney infections and possible failure, and an MRI showed us that her spinal cord had tethered. This is not at all uncommon in children with spina bifida, especially during times of rapid growth, and this explained why we were seeing her lose function in her legs. We had gotten her home just in time. She had surgery in April, 2003 to untether her cord. After her recovery, we have been able to cut her catheterizations down to twice a day, and she has regained the loss of function in her legs. She is actually even running and climbing now. If it hadn't been for the generosity of A Child Waits, we would not have been able to pay the remaining fees to complete Carlin's adoption as soon as we did. It still brings tears to our eyes to think about what would've happened to Carlin had she not gotten home when she did and had her surgery in time to enable her to function as well as she does now. We would certainly love her every bit as much as we do now, but her life would be much harder. And, of course, without daily catheterization, she could eventually have died from kidney failure. We will never be able to adequately express our gratitude to everyone involved in making that possible. Thank you!
God Bless,
Kathy Rosenow
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Scott & Kathy Rosenow
The Shepherd's Crook Ministries
P.O. Box 773
West Chester, OH 45071
www.theshepherdscrook.org
513.844.8873
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