Our Adoption Story

To catch you up...Last March, while living in Siberia, Russia, we began the adoption process. A series of events, led us to believe the Lord was leading us to adopt now. I had been doing some adoption research, hoping that we could adopt from the minority people group we lived among. After 3 months of questions, back and forth to this office and then that one, we finally concluded that adopting independently (without an agency) was impossible. In the process, we got hooked up with an agency called Christian World Adoption, based out of North and South Carolina. Funny enough it was them who told us we couldn't adopt independently from Russia according to their laws. The Russian authorities had no idea.
We wrote several adoption agencies, shopping for the right one. CWA was the only one to respond. Once we decided on them, we asked them which countries that they worked with had sibling groups. Certain countries do not allow you to adopt more than one child at a time. We felt the Lord leading us to adopt a sibling group of 2, 3 or 4 and we were ok with children who were older, both cases considered "special needs" as they are very hard to get adopted. Well, CWA responded and the only two countries they worked with that had sibling groups were Russia and Ethiopia. When we looked at the fees per country and saw how expensive Russia made it, we were left with Ethiopia. Funny. Looking back it seems so obvious that we should adopt from Ethiopia. Curt spent a month there working on 3 children's version of the Jesus Film (a ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ) and just loved the people.
So, we asked to see their waiting children's page. 9 pages full of sibling groups. We looked through it and then looked through it again. We prayed a lot (how do you chose???) and settled on 2 different sibling groups that we asked for more information about. One sibling group was being seriously considered by another couple. Our girls were not. Again, the wide open door.
And so the process began.
First, CWA was very hesistant to work with us. We lived so far out in our village in Siberia, they weren't sure we would have the resources it took to work on the process. "Like which resources?", you ask. A US notary. We needed most documents notarized and our closest US Embassy was a 12 hour car ride and 24 hour train ride away. Could we get all the documents and make one trip? No. They had to be done in order. This was beginning to look impossible. We asked if the Russian notary would notarize a copy in English, if we presented them with the same copy in Russian. They said no. It had to be in Russian. Stalemate.
Then the Lord intervened again. How about using our Power of Attorney, which we already set up in the States? A POA is us and has all the power of the law to act on our behalf in every situation. We approached CWA about it and they were very hesitant because they had never done this before. But we convinced them of our confidence and were finally able to move forward.