It's OFFICIAL! We have signed our agreements and paid our initial program fees. We are switching our adoption program and are adopting from Haiti instead of Ethiopia. We are still adopting through America World Adoption just through a different program!
Why are we making this change?
First and foremost we feel we are being led to do so. One day a couple weeks ago, I was reading our agency's blog for Ethiopia and kinda clicked on Haiti Adoption Requirements by "accident". I decided to read through them while I was on there. When we started our adoption process we didn't qualify to adopt from Haiti, you had to be 35 years old and married for 10 years to adopt from Haiti. I noticed this page I was reading said 30 years old and married for 5 years. Out of curiosity, I decided to email our family coordinator about it and she confirmed that Haiti was in process of changing their adoption laws and in fact they had just made the change on the website. Due to the Haitian president not yet signing the law change they hadn't announced it yet but they were 100% confident it was changing. So now we qualify to adopt from there because we are 32 years old and married 6 years.
It just seemed that God was telling us this was a change we needed to consider.
Other things we had to consider:
Costs- there are some addition fees to switching programs. It costs $1,000 extra for our initial program fee and $450 for a home study update. However, Haiti adoptions are slightly cheaper overall it actually was still cheaper by a few thousand dollars.
Child we would adopt- we can still adopt a healthy (or minor correctable special needs) boy. Adopting from Ethiopia it was going to take up to 5 years to get our son home (probably 3.5-4 years) if adopting a little boy up to 4 years old. From Haiti it will probably take 2 years to bring home a little boy with who is 2 years or younger.
Raising the child in their own culture as well as ours- we have been told by a number of people who have adopted it will be much easier to teach our son about the Haitian culture than the Ethiopian culture. We have not adopted yet so we can only go off the advice of others, we have been told the closer the adoptive country, the easier to teach the culture.
Law Change- The law has not officially been changed. However, there is only one more step and that is for the Haitian president to sign the new law that has been written and approved by all other required layers of their government (this is what we have been told by reliable sources). We were told by our very experienced adoption agency that they are fully confident the president will sign the law.
Reason for adopting- our hearts have always been to adopt from Africa. However, the reason we decided to move forward with adopting was to give an orphan a forever family. To supply a family to a child who wouldn't have one otherwise. To fill a need, we were called to fill, to obey! We can do this by adopting through Ethiopia or Haiti!
After praying about it, researching and talking about it.... we decided to make the change!
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