Big news!

Today we received a letter we have been waiting for to make our big announcement...we are adding to our family!

We have begun the process of adopting from Rwanda! We are all so excited and ask for your prayers along the way. Everything has moved very quickly (astonishingly so) up to this point and now the waiting begins.

I'm sure you'll have lots of questions so I have tried to think of the most common ones we get and list them here:

Why adoption? Why international adoption? Why Rwanda?
We have always wanted to adopt in a general sense. We've met and hugged and cried for orphans in the US, Haiti, Belize, and Mexico and knew that adopting was definitely something we wanted to pursue. We have always wanted a large family and it just made sense for us to grow our family in this way. Josh took an amazing course last year called Perspectives and through all that he learned in that class we decided we wanted to do international adoption. Josh first fell in love with Africa in college when he took Swahili so we narrowed it down to that continent (where there are approximately 50 million orphans). Our dear friends the Lowes and our cousins the Medinas both did Ethiopia so we looked into that, and then our friends the Bowers told us that they had just begun the process of adopting in Rwanda. We immediately loved the idea of Rwanda. We've had a deep affection for Rwanda ever since we saw Hotel Rwanda, and our church has a partnership with ALARM, an amazing ministry based in Rwanda (this video from ALARM's website is amazing). Celestin Musekura's sermon at our church had brought us to tears. When I investigated it further, the program sounded ideal. It's a small country (10 million people) with a small international adoption program (17 adopted to the US last year). It's less expensive than some other programs, and the wait can be shorter too. Best of all, we discovered a couple of unique things about the program that addressed some of our anxiety about adopting. In Rwanda it is illegal to abandon your children (in some countries families unable to feed their children drop them off at orphanages and may or may not return). So orphans in Rwanda are true orphans (their parents are dead or they were found on a street corner with no identifying information). In addition, there is no fee to adopt in Rwanda. So the combination of those factors made us feel certain that we would not be prey to any "baby-buying" schemes.

So what's next?
We have to get a couple of documents authenticated in Washington DC and then deliver them to the Rwandan Embassy. The Ambassador will issue a "non-objection letter" and then our dossier will be on a plane to Rwanda! It will be sent to the Ministry of Gender and Family Promotion there, where they will review our file and then issue an approval (usually 4-6 month wait). About 8 weeks after approval, the nuns that run the orphanage will give us a referral with pictures, medical report, and age. We have 24 hours to accept or reject the referral, and our court date happens pretty quickly after that. Usually parents travel 2-6 weeks after referral. We'll spend a week in Rwanda and then head to Nairobi for US immigration processing.

What are you requesting?
We've requested one or two children younger than Clark.

What agency are you using?
We are not using an agency. The Rwandan government prefers to work with independent families so we have chosen to try the DIY route. We used an amazing agency, Generations Adoptions, in Waco to write our homestudy report. It was hands-down the best experience we could have hoped for, and a much better experience than any of our friends have had as well. I can't recommend them enough!

Thanks so much for your support and prayers. If you have more questions, please feel free to comment and we'll try to answer them! Let the waiting begin!