Big Changes

It occured to me last week when John David had to tell Chad's parents about the changes with our adoption that maybe I need to give an update on what has been happening. About a week after my last post we heard from our homestudy agency that the government had issued a report that said that all people trying to adopt from Nepal should seriously consider switching countries. They have just not been successful in adopting out any children this past year. People who had their dossier's submitted early last year are still waiting for their referrals. And there's also been some concern that the Nepal adoption program has been corrupted. Even if we were able to get our dossier ready to submit by July, it was not looking like Nepal would be the best choice for us. So after hearing about all of this, I asked our social worker what country she would recommend for us to change to. She suggested that we consider Lifeline's China Special Needs program. Any "imperfection" in a child is considered a special need, so there may be minor or correctable things that we could handle. Lifeline also have a very successful CSN program. They actually adopted 40 children through this program last year! This was very encouraging for us since we had not seen any success with the Nepal program. It was kind of funny that this is what she suggested because China is where I started when I first started thinking about adoption. I had even seriously considered the Special Needs program. I honestly can't remember why we went away from this, but it seemed right for us to be brought back to it. We met with the CSN coordinator at Lifeline and she gave us a list of special needs for us to research and think about what we felt like we could handle. I felt like we had a few weeks to make our decision because we were still waiting on our background checks to come back before our homestudy could be completed. On March 19 our background checks came in the mail. So I emailed our social worker and told her to change the country in our homestudy to China! We also had to leave our first adoption agency since the only international country that they work with is Nepal. Thankfully, they were very gracious about it. The only problem that we have run into with changing countries is with Immigration. China is a Hague country, but Nepal is not. That means that there are different forms that you have to file with Immigration. So we will have to submit the other form and send in more fees. We are going to be able to use the fingerprints that we already had done by Immigration so that is good. We certainly did not want to have to do that again. So that is it. We are still determined to adopt. We know that our daughter is out there somewhere, we just have to find her. Hopefully, we are on the right path now. But we will continue to ask God to direct our steps!