Where We Are and Where We Are Going

When God closes a door He opens a window.  Louise and I have been praying that this is the case with our adoption, and have quite the update here.  This will be a long post so just a warning Wall of Text Incoming!

First window to open, our home study should be completed this week.  Our caseworker from Illini Christian Ministries (ICM), said that she will finish it the moment she receives our last recommendation letter, and our letter was mailed last Thursday.  So that is good news right?  Yes, correct, good news… However the first door closed when we received news from ICM two weeks ago that they are getting Hague accredited, and they will require all adoptions to proceed through a licensed agency.  Louise and I are working with an independent lawyer group in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and they do not qualify as an agency.  ICM told us that they were going to finish the Hague accreditation in October of this year, so Louise and I decided to just do whatever we could to finish our adoption before then, and therefore not have to worry about finding an agency to work with.  This was a short-lived goal, because the United States Embassy in the DRC announced that same week that they will be conducting an investigation into every adoption from the DRC, which takes about 3-6 months. This will be great for the                 country, as it will ensure ethical adoptions and less corruption. However it pushed us past our October deadline. That is two shut doors and one open window if you are counting.

Louise and I chose to do the independent adoption, because we did not trust either of the two agencies that were working out of the DRC when we started this process.  One of the agencies was priced at around $25k for the whole adoption process, but after reading individual reports about experiences with that agency we decided that it was not an ethical organization.  The second agency did not break down the cost of adoption, but was priced at $40k for the adoption.  With such a huge disparity between the two agencies, and no empirical evidence from the second agency that the money would go to the children or into their pocket we looked into independent adoption options.

Now with our timetable being stretched from 6-8 months to 12-16 months we have to find an agency, or start from square one.  This is where I think God has possibly opened another window, because the director of ICM suggested we looked into an agency that she used to work for and has just started a pilot program in the DRC.  Louise contacted them last week, and their director is currently out of the office until the 13^th, but the price is around $24k.  This price does not include our cost of travel and stay in country to pick up our child, but is reasonable, and they have an itemized list to show where the money goes.  Louise and I talked it over and believe this is our best path forward.  We obviously have some vetting to do, but are praying and staying hopeful.  Thanks to some wonderful donations, the barn-dance fundraiser, and a garage sale we are currently at $6013.75 raised.  For those of you who care about the financial side of things that means with travel costs, we are 1/5 of the way to our goal.  We will post news about different fundraisers soon, and sorry it took so long for me to write an update.