Thursday, November 21, 2013

Our Adoption Crisis

Well, it happened.  A major adoption crisis.  Every adoption story I've read has at least one major crisis.  And we've hit our first.  Our agency has closed the Ghana adoption program, due to ethical concerns.  We had become concerned with rumors of widespread unethical practices among Ghana adoptions, and decided that we would wait it out and trust our agency.  After just a few weeks of waiting, our agency decided to close the program.  We are so glad that we are working with an agency that has the integrity to stand up to these concerns.

So, what now??

We have decided to join a pilot program with our agency, Generations, in the country of Cameroon.  Cameroon is also in West Africa, and has just over 1 million orphans.  Generations is working with Shaping Destiny, and we have already started the process of changing things over to Cameroon.  This does set us back quite a bit in our timeline, however.  It's almost like starting over.  We must complete a home study update, and file a change with USCIS before our dossier will be ready to submit to Cameroon.  Hopefully, neither of these will take very long to complete.  Although the general process seems to go much more smoothly in Cameroon, it is still a pilot program...so there are always unknowns.  Our biggest wait will be for a referral, not because there is a long list, but because the attorney in Cameroon can only work with a certain number of cases at a time.  So now, it's back to paper-chasing for me, and more waiting.  We know that whatever happens, God is in control.  He knows where our daughter is, who she is, and when she will join our family.  Please keep praying for us!