Sorry it has been so long since I have updated this. We have been super busy with the holidays and all... I will try and do better!
When Joel and I decided to adopt we had already made the decision to adopt from Uganda. I have had a lot of people ask why we chose international adoption or even Africa, so you may find yourself asking the same question. Unfortunately I don’t know how fulfilling my answer will be for you.. It is just where our hearts were. Uganda being where Joel’s father is from made choosing a country fairly easy.
Picking an agency from this point was slightly limited. For some reason there are fewer agencies that adopt out of Uganda. I made a list of the agencies and a little chart with questions, called, asked, compared, and when it came down to it the answers and mostly the feeling we had about the agency we chose led us to them. So on July 25th we put the application in the mailbox and by July 27th we had an email from the agency saying “Welcome to our Ugandan Program”. We were officially accepted 2 days after the application hit the mailbox. Now a little side note to this story is at the same time we are doing all this, I am asking friends to pray with us for this process to go as fast as it can so we could meet our baby soon! I would say a 2 day response put us off to a good start! God is so good!
We had an online orientation scheduled a couple weeks later and found out another little blessing in all of this. Now those of you who know me may have already figured this out, I get a little carried away with my thoughts sometimes and tend to worry a little (and I use “a little” loosely) about things. So in the 2 weeks we were waiting for the online orientation I had some concerns about the process and hoping the agency was really one who had our babies and our best interest in mind. So seconds before our orientation we got our skype working and instead of doing the orientation over the phone we were able to meet face to face! We went over everything, got off skype and Joel mentioned how familiar the girl we met with (our case worker) looked. After a couple minutes of thinking Joel realized he went to St. James (our old church) with this girl when he was in middle school! Now I didn’t mention this but our agency is based in Texas which is where this girl is. So I HAD to call her back immediately to tell her! This was a huge blessing! It may not make sense to you but God knew what this would do for me, and it has really helped me be at ease during this whole process. Now don’t get me wrong, this girl is awesome, and the agency has a great reputation which should have been enough, but its little things like that along the way where God pops in and reaffirms what we are doing!
Next we found a great social worker in Stillwater (who was much more affordable than those in Tulsa) for our home study. Met with her the first of three times August 29th, and by October 13th we had our completed home study. October 19th we mailed our home study with an application to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, which you must do if you want to adopt a baby from another country. We were contacted with an appointment to be fingerprinted by USCIS in Oklahoma City on November 22nd, which we did and had our approval letter from them in our mailbox on December 23rd (possible the 22nd but I didn’t check the mail that day)! We then emailed the case worker at our agency and we are now officially on the wait list at number 17!!! We are expecting to wait about 8 months to be matched with our sweet baby. We are praying for God to help us wait and prepare during this time and would greatly appreciate for you to pray that with us! I will update you as we are updated.
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| Joel and I on our way to OKC for fingerprinting |
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| The first picture of us our baby will see! |
