Pray for Turners

Don't usually do this but I have great concern for Jim Bob and Conethia Turner. Many of you know Conethia because she has participated in so many of our blogs, including ours, and has been a great encouragement to us. They are in Ukraine now and have had 2 SDA referrals and neither of them went well. They are heartbroken and so badly want this adoption to work. Please pray that they get a 3rd SDA appt. and that they would find their child...

Blog Overload

Hmmm... Added a few more blogs tonight... thought I'd count them to see how many we link to... yikes 325!

"From Caring Comes Courage"

I was going into Burger King earlier today and I noticed this little poster on the window in the entrance advertising something for the Disabled American Veterans organization. There was a quote on it that I found to be profound and very meaningful to me. It is,

"From Caring Comes Courage"

-- Lao Tzu

Four little words. But consider carefully the truth in them.

Where do ordinary people get the courage to do extraordinary things? From something they're passionate about. What are you passionate about? Are you passionate about orphans? How about the orphans of Ukraine?

Where do you get the courage to open up your life to strangers?

Or the courage to spend a small fortune on an adoption when you can't afford it?

...The courage to ask your boss for a month off from work?

...The courage to be away from your kids at home for a month?

...The courage to use all of your vacation time, and if there's not enough, to take unpaid leave?

...The courage to travel to a place where they don't speak your language, don't understand you, and don't even want to?

...The courage to lose all of your status that you have back home and to be treated like a dolt by Ukrainians?

...The courage to be at the mercy of the SDA regarding the referrals they present you with?

...The courage to put all your faith into a Ukrainian businessperson to help you over there?

...The courage to deal with the capriciousness of all of the government officials that you absolutely cannot avoid?

...The courage to take in a small child that may have health problems?

...The courage to take in an older child who might have emotional baggage?

...The courage to shatter the status quo back at home and alter the dynamics in your home?

...The courage to teach foreign-born children the English language and the ways of Americans?

...The courage to deal with the adaptation issues that will arise when you bring an orphan into your home?

...The courage to deal with small-minded individuals who treat your struggling Ukie poorly?

...The courage to press on, even on the trying days when you feel like you've made the biggest mistake of your life?

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I try to follow a lot of Ukrainian adoption blogs, and, every day, I see ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Take for example, the Wolff family, who, as I write this post, are in Ukraine adopting two teenage girls. Recently, the Wolff's posted an entry to their blog called "Goodbye", which seems to have touched many of their readers. It is about the day that they went to pick up their girls from the orphanage for the last time, and the difficulty of leaving behind so many others.

Sometimes it all seems so futile, but it isn't of course. The Wolff's write often about rescuing their girls, from an almost certain terrible future. So, it isn't futile for them.

The truth is, if everyone reading this blog, and all the others, caught the vision for adoption, especially of older children, think of the impact that could be made! All it takes is for caring people to get over whatever fear they have that is holding them back, and get the courage that flows from passion.

Last summer, I posted about an adoption story that appeared in an Ohio newspaper. It is probably my favorite post of all that I've done, so far. Take a look at it, if you haven't before.

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Some say that the following words were written on the wall in Mother Teresa's own room. Wouldn't you say that they fit her life? How about yours?

People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies. Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and sincere people may deceive you. Be honest and sincere anyway.

What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight. Create anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous. Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, will often be forgotten. Do good anyway.

Give the best you have, and it will never be enough. Give your best anyway.

In the final analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway.

So, You Want to Adopt a Little Kid?

Recently, Ukraine released new information regarding the 2008 quota for foreign adoptions. If you will recall, back in Dec. 2007, they issued the infamous Decree #4939, which limited all foreign adoptions to 1,453 dossiers, or families. The exact number of children this represents is unknown, but probably close to that number. By March of this year, the backlog of dossiers to submit by foreigners reached this limit, and no amount of pleading by those that didn't make it in would make them budge. That's why we got stuck all year. Now, as the end of 2008 nears, they have tallied up the number of dossiers they have processed so far, and have observed that they will actually end up under the quota. Therefore, they are allowing more dossiers to be submitted at this time. The exact number they will allow is unclear, but estimates range from 200-400. It is clear, however, that they will cease accepting dossiers on Nov. 27, regardless of whether the quota is reached. Also, if the quota is reached prior to Nov. 27, all submissions will cease.

The Ukrainian government also provided statistics of how many children are available for adoption to foreigners. You must realize that not all children in orphanages are available for adoptions. In fact, I have seen estimates that only 10% are available for adoption. There are several reasons for this. First of all, Ukrainians get first dibs on the children. When a child enters an orphanage, for the first 14 months they are available to Ukrainians only. Healthy babies are the most likely to be adopted by Ukrainians. Second, many, many children are in the orphanages for economic reasons, and still have family that loves them and visits them. Third, the Ukrainian government is having some success with their foster care system recently, especially for the younger children. Fourth, siblings will rarely be adopted separately. If an older sibling refuses to be adopted, or no one has any interest in him or her, then the younger ones will very likely not be adoptable. So, just keep this is mind when you see orphanage pictures with all those cute little kiddies.

The new official statistics presented the data broken down by age and health. There are 4 age groups, and healthy or unhealthy. The original document can be found on this US Embassy page. I have made a graph so that you can see the data visually.



The first thing you will notice is that there are about 25x more older children available than younger ones. Second, they claim that there are no children under 3 yo available for foreign adoption without "serious health problems". I have often been amazed at the blogs of people who went over there and then were told that there were NO healthy children. See for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

If you are going into your SDA appt. blind, looking for a very young child, then you can see for yourself the chances of getting a healthy child, if that is your desire. It's not impossible, just difficult. You must be prepared emotionally before you go, and both spouses need to be on the same page regarding what kinds of health problems are manageable.

Art*Music*Justice

How do you love God? Or what does it even mean to love God? I'll address that later.

I mentioned in my last post that I would blog about the concert that was held as part of Greg Christy's inaguration as the new president at Northwestern College in Orange City, IA, a couple of weekends ago. I had meant to blog about it right away, but man, sometimes it is hard to find time to do it. And this post has taken a little more thought than usual.

The concert was the Art*Music*Justice tour and it was on campus Saturday night. The AMJ tour features 5 recording artists: Sara Groves, Charlie Peacock, Brandon Heath, Derek Webb, and his (pregnant) wife Sandra McCracken. You can follow the AMJ link to learn more about these musicians. There is a press release here.

The cost of admission to the concert was food items for the local food pantry.



I've been a fan of Sara's for awhile now. I love her songwriting. A couple of years ago we and the Christy's saw Sara in concert in a coffee house in Sioux Falls. It was a great venue where we could really be up-close with her. Since the Christy's were organizing the whole inauguration weekend, they were able to get us backstage to meet the artists.



Michelle Christy started the evening by explaining what Art*Music*Justice is all about. It is about proximate justice. Knowing that someday, Jesus will bring ultimate justice, and finally deal with evil. But in the meantime, we are to help bring justice to people and society, even if the victims don't truly perceive Christ's hand in it or understand our motivations. We do it regardless, because it is the right thing to do. Because God demands it. Stand up for the weak. Defend the widows and fatherless. We don't merely say be warm, be filled. We act. When God's people mobilize out of love, we bear witness to His love and mercy, and ultimately, He receives the glory. Backstage, Charlie Peacock and Michelle were talking, and he mentioned that he was surprised to hear her bring up proximate justice. The term is not real well known outside of theological circles. See for example here and here.



I was happy to hear Michelle's introduction mention this blog. She noted how we are adopting from Ukraine and that she saw my post from last April with Sara Grove's I Saw What I Saw video. How adopting orphans is a way of helping to bring justice to the world. I didn't know it until this concert that the video came out of an International Justice Mission (IJM) trip that Sara took to Kenya. IJM is an organization of volunteers that uses legal means to help bring social justice to the opressed. They showed a couple of IJM videos during the concert, one where slaves in a Banglesheshi brick factory had been freed and now one of them was starting his own brick factory, and another where a young Cambodian girl held captive as a sex slave was rescued. By the way, have you ever taken a look at Tony and Kimberly's blog that we link to? They are working on a Ukrainian adoption and they have posted about IJM topics here and here. Tony is on a trip to Asia now doing something related to IJM.

At one point in the concert, Sara's husband Troy came out to tell the audience that if they would commit to sponsoring a child that evening, they would get a free Sara Groves CD on the spot. They also brought two of their young sons out, but my camera batteries died so I didn't get a picture of them.



Surprisingly to me, the only time everyone was together on stage was at the very beginning and end of the concert. The majority of the time it was the individual artists performing their own material.

Here are Charlie, Brandon, and Sara.



Here are Sandra and Derek. Derek played a 12-string Taylor, which I was very interested in. During the last song of the night, he a broke a G string. On the guitar that is! I play guitar as well, and if you have to break a string, the last song is a great one to do it on.



At one point, Charlie Peacock gave a long message, even a sermon if you want to call it that, about following after God. You know, when you listen to a sermon, or a speech, or a presidential debate, even if it is a very good one, maybe only one thing sticks with you. I call that the take-away. What do I take away with me afterward? What is the most memorable? For me, it was something Charlie said. This is where I will answer the question at the top of the post. He said,

"What does it mean to love God? It means to love the things that God loves. Be interested in the things that He is interested in. And if you don't know what that is, you need to spend the rest of your life finding out."

He had the Bible open and quoted a lot of verses. I don't remember if he mentioned this one, but I think of Micah 6:8,

He has shown you, O man, what is good;
And what does the LORD require of you
But to do justly,
To love mercy,
And to walk humbly with your God?

The evening closed out with a time of worship. They had the words on the screen so everyone could sing along. It was a great way to finish off a great evening.



If the Art*Music*Justice tour comes to your area, I recommend that you go see it, but not with small children. There is a tour schedule here.

Ditto on that Scanner Thing

In Michelle's blog post "Thank God for scanners", she mentions that she scans all of their dossier documents.

We did the same thing. It is the way to go. The first time you work on a dossier, you really have no idea what you are doing. Our facilitator, Oleg, has templates of the documents on his website. Those are indispensible, but after you get them filled out like you think they should be, you will invariably find that something is not filled out just right. What we did was scan the documents as we got them ready, BEFORE the apostilles, then emailed them over to Ukraine for review. Oleg and Dima looked them over and emailed us feedback for things to change. Most changes were little, but apparently very important. The medical forms were especially troublesome. They took several rounds of revisions until we got them right. I can't imagine actually mailing the documents back and forth to get them right. Ick. Once they gave us the thumbs-up, we sent them to the SD Secretary of State's office for apostilles, then UPS'd the originals over to Kiev.

As I blogged before, our documents in the dossier are expiring. We are slowly replacing them with updated versions. I'm kind of dragging my feet on getting them sent over, though, since there is cost involved and it seems needless at this time. There is very little hope of getting our dossier submitted this year, even though we are wanting to adopt older kids.

Blogrolls

Just got done changing the links in our blogs to blogrolls. I was finding that it was just too time-consuming to check the various blogs for any updates. Now I can tell at a glance if there are any new posts. It took a bit of effort, though, to get that done, that's why I didn't do it sooner. There are some blogs that don't have what they call "feeds", so they don't update and they show up at the end of the lists.

If you're a blog author on Blogger you might consider making the change as well.

I also rearranged the order of the links so that those in Ukraine or about to go are near the top, since from looking at the blog traffic it looks like those are the blogs that most people jump to.

Flower Girl

I was glad to come across Josh Via's blog post that describes the funeral for Steven Curtis Chapman's daughter Maria. Maria was a five year old girl from China that the Chapman's adopted and, tragically, was run over in their driveway and died. I avoided mentioning it before, but the description of the service is incredible. One thing that stood out to me was that she was buried in the dress she would have worn as a flower girl in her sister's wedding.

Steven has a tremendous heart for orphans and adoption. Besides being an award-winning recording artist, he is the founder of Shaohannah's Hope, which is a foundation and resource for people that need help with adoption. If you need financial assistance for an adoption, you can apply for a grant.

UPDATE: There is more coverage and pictures of the memorial service here.

12 Starfish and Counting

Well, I accidently surfed into Jennifer Hambrick's blog and noticed that she mentioned that she was one of 17 children... That caught my attention! Her siblings are 5 bio and 12 adopted kids. And then she says that her parents are leaving for Ukraine today to adopt 5 more. Wow.

This will be a story that you will want to follow. I've added her mom's blog to our In Ukraine to Adopt links, and you can also go here Paul & Jeane - Blessed By a Child.

Over the Horizon

I have struggled with this post. It is on a topic that is emotional and controversial.

I'm posting about an old newspaper article concerning hosting. So, if you're familiar with it and don't want to rehash it, you may want to skip this post.

A while back I came across this article in the NY Times, called A Taste Of U.S. Family Life, But Adoption In Limbo (NYT might require a login, try alternate sites here and here). It talks about the pro's and cons of hosting orphans in the United States, without the stated intention of adopting them. I know there are many people (a majority?) that really don't have the intention to adopt the kids, and I believe the kids are told up front that this is just a visit. But really, who could blame the child for getting his hopes up that maybe someone would adopt him?

On the other hand, others are specifically looking at hosting as an opportunity to find a specific child to adopt. But even so, there are no guarantees. The SDA will have the final say. The adoptive parents will have to be very persuasive that they should be allowed to adopt that specific child (without their facilitator with them). The article alludes to favors or donations that might be required to get a favorable referral. And since you can't "reserve" a specific child, there is competition. I have wondered about how much info to post on this blog about Sergei and Valya. Is someone else going to see the information here about them and beat us to the SDA? You cannot blame an orphan for agreeing to go with the first family willing to adopt them. The second chance may never come. There are 1,000 things that can disrupt an adoption, no matter how hard you try. Some time ago I went back to my posts on Sergei and Valya and edited out some information. I have personally corresponded with someone by email who forbade me to say anything about the child they want to adopt.

But what if you go to your SDA appointment with absolutely no idea of a child ahead of time, other than perhaps a desired age range? This is also risky. Recently, the SDA has been telling adoptive parents that there are NO healthy children available for adoption. This is an outright lie and it angers me. I absolutely do not fault any family that decides not to adopt a child with severe medical problems. The family needs to talk about this ahead of time and be in agreement that they are called for these children. Some families are only getting one chance at the SDA, which severely limits the opportunity for a successful adoption.

Overall, I guess, I would have to say I'm neutral toward hosting. I know some of you reading this had a great experience. Others have not. I agree with this post about Dr. Rosini, the director of Frontier Horizon: it is a gamble.

My Kingdom for a Referral

There is an official process for picking a child to adopt in Ukraine and that is to visit the SDA offices in Kiev and view portfolios of kids that they provide to you, and then choose one.

That is, unless you already have a referral for one. It is a little mysterious to me how that works officially, since it is illegal for a third party to act as an agent or broker in the adoption process. How do you find out about a child other than the SDA? Word of mouth. Hosting. Prior visits to orphanages. Siblings. Providence. Good luck. We found out about Sergei and Valya in those ways.

This is on my mind today, because I was reading some of the adoption blogs that we have links to from ours, and found some cases of failed Ukrainian adoptions. Several families recently went to Kiev to adopt, and the only kids that the SDA would show the families had serious medical problems. They had gone to Ukraine without a specific child in mind beforehand. I will let you read about them if you wish, but it is just too sad.

Shirley and Steve
Dave and Gina
Drew and Rita
Jason and Erica

If you are looking to adopt from Ukraine, it's a good idea to have a child in mind before you go. I say all this as someone who hasn't actually completed an adoption yet. Take it for what it's worth.

Taxation With Representation

Happy Tax Day everyone!

We've been getting advice to contact our US Senators to try to get some intervention for our dossier in Kiev. Out on the forum, one party said it wouldn't do any good, but others said it would be helpful. So I think we'll give it a try. Thanks especially to Dr. David for his helpful blog post. I'll post later with more detail. Gotta run now.

Why, Oh Why, WHY Ukraine!!??

I want to take a minute and tell you about how we decided to adopt from Ukraine. I suppose I should also answer, why did we even decide to adopt?

Nancy and I have been married since 1990. I was 28, she was 34. I don't know if we ever really said, we want x children, we just kind of let things happen naturally. In 1994, our son Mark was born. Now, almost 14 years have gone by and we have no other children.

A few years back, Nancy and I attended an adoption seminar, or orientation, or whatever you call it, at Lutheran Social Services in Sioux Falls. But afterwards, neither of us felt a burning passion to go with their program. We just let it go.

Then, last year, our niece Sabrina and her husband went on a mission trip to Chile, where they did construction work on an orphanage. She sent us some info on a little boy that they wanted to see get adopted. When Mark saw that, he was all for it. He has always wanted siblings.

But about that same time, we learned that another family in our city, the Tolly's, had gone over to Ukraine to adopt two girls. That got us interested in Ukrainian adoptions. The Tolly's have become our friends and an invaluable resource as we pursue our own Ukrainian adoptions. Take a look at their adoption blog if you're interested.

Now, the unfortunate part. Ukraine is a relatively new country. Until the 1990's, it was part of the Soviet Union. They sometimes halt adoptions as they change the adoption procedures or whatever. We appear to be in one of these times. Our facilitator, Oleg, has told us that the government is not allowing adoptions right now. Dr. David has a great post on the situation. So we can only wait, and hope that some day, some way, things will change. The real bummer is that if we have to wait too long, the documents in our dossier will expire and we will have to start over. Pray with us for a miracle that the situation will improve. Not for us, really, but for the kids caught in the middle who desperately would like a family.