Everyone Counts

For those of you who might want to read what I wrote for Jay’s message at church this weekend, here it is, complete with pictures that were up on the side screens.  The series they are in is about obscure Bible characters and Jay taught about Cornelius and how he was a Gentile among the Jews, someone who would have been considered an outcast.  One of our new church’s values is that everyone counts, no matter what.  Jay asked me to write a piece for him about how the value of everyone counts plays a part in our decision to adopt a child with special needs.  Jay had to cut a bit of it for timing purposes, but this is the full version below.  I hope you enjoy.

Everyone Counts

The night I first met Hilary at a Scooter’s Coffeehouse on 84^th Street in Lincoln was one that changed my family.  Introduced to her by a good friend of mine, Hilary shared pictures of her daughter adopted from Kyrgyzstan.  Oh, that sweet face with the chubby cheeks that your lips would get lost in if you kissed them!  And believe me, you wouldn’t be able to resist puckering up and laying one on each satiny cheek.  I listened to a proud mom’s story as I flipped through the photo album that she always kept in her bag for precisely these moments.  A dozen or so pictures into the album and I was alerted to the difference.  Sweet baby Anara was born missing the tips of some fingers and toes and for that reason she could have been unwelcomed in the Kyrgy society.  By the grace of God, she was placed in an orphanage, her adoption file listed online, only to be found on the other side of the globe, by my new friend who knew this little baby girl was the missing puzzle piece to their family.

From that night on, I knew my heart had been melted, destroyed, crushed by the reality that people in this world deem others as misfits. How could someone say no to such a child as this? It happens every day. Day after day I receive an email or two, sometimes 12, I kid you not, from agencies trying to place orphans with medical needs that label them unworthy in their countries of origin. How my heart agonizes over their faces. If I could only bring each of them home! Countless times I have sat on the stool in my kitchen staring at the computer screen with the image of a child I so desperately want to help, call my own and I just sit sobbing with my head in my hands, tears falling onto the keyboard. Twice I have nearly dumped our adoption plans for two of these children because I couldn’t get them out of my brain! Their faces are forever etched into my memory. All I can do for these children is pray and the awesome thing is that God answers prayer. When I’ve called back to inquire about these 2 particular children, God had found them a forever family. More sobbing. But this time, tears of gratitude for families who accept these children and give them the care and the love they absolutely deserve.

Jay and I have been surrounded by people in our lives that even our own American society would stop and stare at, completely ignore, deem useless, but in God’s eyes, they count!  We have a friend Carmie in Chicago with Tourette’s Syndrome. Carmie has a list of ticks a mile long including raising his arms above his head, jumping straight up and trying to fly like Superman, doing “the swim” dance, even flipping people the bird. You can imagine the stares he’d get for that one! But Carmie could clean and worked on the Facility Set-up crew at the church we grew up in. He had time for anyone and everyone who wanted to stop and chat. If you needed prayer for anything, Carmie would be praying for you without a doubt. Carmie counts.

I worked in our catering kitchen with a gal named Barbara Jean.  She had been born with multiple physical deformities that left her face lopsided like a Picasso painting and she had hearing and mental incapacities as well.  But Barbara Jean could serve!  She’d tray up hundreds of rolls and wrap hundreds of potatoes in foil for our evening dinner service.  She had love for the rest of the staff, a love of her Savior, and she had an echoing laugh that Jay and I have burned onto the CD of our minds.  Barbara Jean counts.

After years of struggling with unexplained infertility, our friends in North Carolina were blessed with their first biological baby boy.  But shortly after bringing home this miracle from the hospital doctors noticed something wasn’t quite right.  Months of testing led to a diagnosis of severe hearing loss.  Baby Matthew was almost completely deaf in 1 ear and suffered what the doctors diagnosed as profound hearing loss in the other ear.  Although we’ve never met him because they live so far away, we see pictures of this darling blonde haired, blue eyed boy on Facebook and in their annual Christmas letter.  Matthew has a smile that could just about make all the bad stuff about our world fade away.  He loves  anything with a steering wheel and can’t go anywhere without a fireman’s hat, a typical, normal 4 year old boy today.  Matthew counts.

My list certainly doesn’t end there and I could name probably a dozen additional people whom God has used to grow my heart.  He has clearly been preparing us for a special addition to our family by surrounding us with people who might be overlooked, judged, unloved.   While I know we will get stops and stares, whispers and even harsh words spoken about us, I will follow what God has called me to.  And I pray that my daughter’s story will open up doors of acceptance, soften hearts of insensitivity and flood our communities with compassion and love for one another because everyone counts.

Twice as Long -- Why Should I Expect Anything Different?

Oh where, oh where has my dossier gone?
Oh where, oh where can it be?

I spoke with our agency today and my dossier is still out for Authentication.  They originally said it would only take a week, maybe 2, after they receive my final form from USCIS.  Once again, that time has been doubled.  We still need to get that dossier to China before we move.

But never fear… our house hasn’t sold yet.  I’m not Catholic, but I’m about ready to bury a statue of St. Joseph in my yard!  Anyone have one I can borrow?  We’ve dropped the price yet again (despite knowing we’re at the right price because other homes in my neighborhood are selling) and that hasn’t even brought in any more showings.  Not one.

And just when you think matters can’t get any worse, Jay’s back is getting bad again.  Need to find a new doctor in CA and schedule another steroid shot.  With a move pending, now is not the time for surgery.

Oh, but wait!  It can get worse!  Jay was in a car accident last weekend and our Corolla was totaled! Thankfully he’s OK, as is the other driver and his passenger.  The car engine still runs great but the entire front was crumpled – bumper, hood and both quarter panels.  I don’t even want to see a picture of it. Although it wasn’t the first car I ever had, it was the first car I bought on my own, without the help of my parents, after graduating college.  I did the test driving.  I did the negotiations.  On.  My.  Own.   So, it’s hard to see it face an ugly demise.  It was a 12 year old car and the damage done is more than the car is worth, so it's going to the junkyard.  And wouldn't luck have it, we insured it for liability only in order to cut down on monthly bills with hopes to save more for the adoption.  Adopting families, heed my warning!  It might cost more to insure your older model car with collision too, but in my very recent experience, it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than digging into that savings account for a new (used) car!

The timing of this could not have been worse.  It all makes us depend on God even more.  Just when I thought I had enough in the savings account for our next adoption payment when we get our referral, we’re going to need those funds for a replacement vehicle instead.  I know God will provide for the adoption because He’s been faithful to the very penny of every amount we’ve needed to send thus far.  But gosh, this is just so unfair!  I’d really like one thing to start going right.  Is that too much to ask?  The house selling, the dossier being sent to China, my husband’s back pain to be solved (permanently), finding a house easily in CA (note the oxymoron in that statement) – I’d really love for something to go right.

OK, enough of my moaning and whining.

Stay tuned for Sunday’s post.  Jay is giving his first message at our new church.  He asked me to write a piece for it and I absolutely loved doing it.  Although for timing purposes, he had to cut parts of what I wrote, I’ll post the writing in its entirety here, complete with photos.  The subject matter ties into our adoption as well as one of our new church’s core values.  I think you’ll enjoy it.

See you Sunday.

Allow Me To Explain

My apologies for the blog hiatus.  I’ve truly missed all your adoption updates and have taken a random glance every now and then at your amazing stories.

You know how a new year contains so much hope and wishes for prosperity?  That’s what we planned after giving 2010 a swift kick in its big ol’ behind and closing the door on its sorry face.  But this year has been worse, perhaps, than all of 2010 had been.

I’m not going into the details here because they aren’t important.  Those of you family and friends know it all already.  The good news is that my husband has gone through a job change and we are now expecting a move to Northern California.  We are trying to sell our house and we’re going to try and sell it ourselves with hopes that the money we save by selling by owner can go towards our adoption.

I’ve spoken with our social worker as well as our agency this morning and of course, this delays our adoption process.  It IS POSSIBLE to move while adopting. [YAY!]  It just means more delays and more money. [BOO!]   Right now we are waiting on our final forms from USCIS and still need to get our college basement renter fingerprinted (yes, he still needs to be included even though he won’t be moving to CA with us).  We will have to update our home study in our new locale.  With that come new police clearances, new forms, more money and more time.

I still do not hear God telling us to stop the adoption even though at this point, I'm exhausted.  But I still feel the call to live out Psalms 82:3 in a very tangible, personal way.  I will not give up.

The biggest concern we have right now is getting our dossier to China BEFORE we move out west!  If the 3 of us adults can get finger printed and if we can receive that final form from USCIS before we sell the house, then our dossier can go overseas and we can just submit a home study update once we arrive in California. This is a HUGE prayer request!  Please pray that we get this last form within the month of April and that our dossier can be submitted to China!!!

Additional prayer requests on the tab above.

Time Sensitive Prayer Request!

We are closing the gap on the magic date of April 15th – the date our paperwork will [hopefully] be sent to Kathmandu, Nepal!

Friends, we need your prayer for our adoption finances. We have used our own savings account, we have fundraised, we have applied for grants (and have been denied 1 of them), we have used our ’09 tax return (to complete the fundraising ticker above). We now find ourselves needing $7000 before our dossier can be sent overseas. This is part of our first "Foreign Country Fee."

We have applied for an interest-free adoption loan. However the timing of this loan from application to approval is 6-8 weeks. Please pray that our request would be granted sooner than that! If necessary, we will go to the bank for a home equity loan, but we’ve been told that the adoption loan is the first way to go. We are also considering sending out another fundraising letter to local businesses for their support.

Please pray that we can raise the $7000 we need just in time for our paperwork to go overseas and we aren’t delayed any further!

Movement -- Finally!

This has been a crazy week for us! A week full of prayer, investigating, research and finally decisions! Allow me to share the biggest news first.

I received a phone call today from our local friends also adopting a daughter from Nepal. After months of being closed down due to corruption, the news in Nepal is finally stating that all governmental officials are in place and they will be processing adoptions once again. In fact, they state that their goal is to have all 2009 dossiers fulfilled within the next 2 months! They will focus on issuing travel dates for those with referrals first, but will also be matching children to families and issuing new referrals for those 2009 files. So, 2009 families, hold onto your hats! There is much rejoicing as this directly affects our friends! Praise God!

The Nepali government recognizes the number of orphans that need assistance! They have no intention of shutting down and will push hard to solve the problem.

For us, we are still waiting for the last form for our dossier. I hope that it is on it's way this week or next.

This is the crystal clear answer to prayer we have been looking for these last few days. Only a handful of you knew, but we had been investigating leaving the Nepal program and pursuing the adoption of a waiting child in South Korea. She is an absolute dream and as hard as it is to know she is not for our family, it is an honor to know that our family is to be on our knees in prayer for her. Thank you to those of you who have been assisting us with medical information and praying right along with us. This is the answer we have been praying for. That is crystal clear to me! Please keep "Miss Precious," as we've been calling her, in your prayers for her forever family. She's darling and she stole my heart!

Next update when our dossier is complete. Please join us in prayer for the remaining fundraising needed for our Completion of Documents Fee on the ticker above. God can do abundantly more than we are asking of Him and I leave it completely in His strong, capable hands! We hope we can fundraise this final amount and then take out a home equity loan for the foreign country fee ($7000) that will be due when our paperwork is shipped to Nepal.

Our God is so faithful and I am so thankful for the answers we have been given this week!

A Nepali Christmas?

With Nepal being a country far from Christianity, they obviously do not celebrate our Christmas. But in honor of our daughter we enjoyed a few Nepali foods on Christmas Eve as a way to celebrate with her.

After our finger printing trip on Tuesday, we stopped off at an Indian Market in Omaha and picked up a few specialty ingredients I would need to finish my Nepali dinner. The menu included:

Momos (top left): A meat dumpling native to the Himalayas

Pulau (top right): A simple rice dish with spices, cashews and golden raisins
Dal Bhat (bottom): A lentil soup and rice dish that is a very typical meal in Nepal

Everything was really very good and I'd like to try different recipes in the future. Our favorite was probably the Momo! Everything should have been a bit spicier, but I kept the Scoville units low so the kids could palate them. Poor E still did not enjoy the meal. I forsee us travelling with at least 3 jars of peanut butter to Nepal next year just for him!

We followed our dinner with Christmas cookies and the exchanging of gifts. I look at my mantle now and hope and pray that there will be a stocking hanging full of gifts and a beautiful brown eyed girl running downstairs to open them next year!

Merry Christmas, sweet girl! May you be celebrating here with us in your forever home next year and may you know the immeasurable blessings of our Savior, born in a manger, who came just for you!

Unrest in Nepal

Things don't sound great in Nepal right now. There has been much protesting by the Maoist Party and threatening to blockade the entire Kathmandu Valley. Visit www.ekantipur.com for details on what is happening in detail.

This does not bode well for those of us adopting from Nepal, but we pray for a peaceful end to these protests. And in the midst of this, we receive an email from our case worker at our agency:

Dear Friends,

We have received several inquires about the activities recently happening in Nepal. As many of you have read on online newspapers and Nepal Adoption blogs, the Maoist political party has taken to the streets again, for what they call “peaceful” protests. When these types of events happen it is common that the government offices will close down for the day, and this has happened during this time as well. These activities have been happening over the last week. We understand that this is not the news from Nepal you would like to hear, but we strongly believe that the protests are not an indication that the adoption process will come to a halt or be affected in any negative way.

Many agencies in the US are currently awaiting referrals. We have hopeful that we will receive our first referrals by mid November for two families whose dossiers were submitted to the Ministry in the Spring.

Louise

So, please join us in praying for peace in Nepal and that the Nepali children can come home to their forever families across the globe!

In personal adoption news, our certified, notarized, official home study is here, actually in my possession! Three additional copies are on their way to our agency for our dossier and one more copy for the USCIS. That means we should be expecting our invitation to Omaha for our fingerprints. How long will this take? We don't know. For friends of ours, this process delayed their dossier and set them back on their agency's list. But once our fingerprints are processed, we will receive the 1 final piece of documentation for our dossier. We'll be done! Then the real waiting begins.

What's in our Dossier -- Part 3

Here we are with the last of our dossier! Okay, it isn't quite the last because we are still awaiting our I-171H form and need to be invited to Omaha for the finger printing appointment for that form to be issued. But this is the last of the bulk mailings we have for the dossier. Included in this mailing were:

• 10 passport size pictures of each adopting parent
• 2 Employment and Educational History Forms
• 2 copies of our home study agency license
• 2 copies of our home study agency non-profit certificate: the 501(C)3
• 2 copies of our home study social worker’s license or credentials
• 2 photocopies of the photo ID/signature page of our passport for each applicant
• 2 sets (12 in each set) of photographs of our home and exterior views from our home.

The home study just needs 2 sections rewritten, but should be on it's way to our agency by now. And thanks to donations by friends and family, that $300 we were waiting on for the Home Study Review Fee ($600 total) has been sent to our agency. God just showed up and dropped these gifts in our lap. Thanks to those of you who have answered the call and served us! We are completely humbled by His provision through your support!

With the dossier almost done, we are trying to raise funds for the Completion of Documents Fee. This fee is $4000 and you can see our ticker at the top of our blog on where we are. We keep receiving little checks here and there and the ticker is creeping forward. Wow! Yes, even a little bit helps! Please be in prayer for these finances. I am still praying that we can remain debt free through 2009. If we can accomplish this phase of fundraising, we will move onto phase 2 which will be an additional $7000 that will be due in January as our paperwork goes overseas!

We hope to hear of news of referrals going out for families on the waiting list. Our agency is confident that the families going before us should be receiving news of their children soon!

What's in our Dossier -- Part 2

Here we are again with another milestone -- the second shipment of paperwork to our agency! This is the second of three mailings we’ll complete and it is comprised of Certified Documents. We had to provide:

· 2 copies of birth certificates for both Jay and I
· 2 copies of birth certificates for both boys
· 2 copies of our marriage license

These all had to be certified copies, not photocopies, and with recent issue dates stamped on them so that they don’t “expire” before being sent to Nepal. This isn’t really a huge feat in and of itself, but the cost of ordering multiple copies of all this stuff added up. Your gifts and donations helped cover these expenses and help keep us debt free to date!

You may recall that in our first mailing last month, we were missing 2 key Notarized Documents for our dossier. Thankfully the first document has now arrived and was also included in today’s shipment. That included:

· 2 copies of our Nebraska State background check for both Jay and I

Our home study is done too! We've seen the rough draft and our agency should be approving it this week. Then we can have that notarized and added to our dossier as well.

Next we move onto section 3 of 3. I have most of these documents done but am waiting to receive Jay's renewed passport. We also expect to be invited (yes, you read that correctly) to Omaha to have our fingerprints taken for our Federal file. When those are taken, we will be issued our I-171H form and we’ll be done with the dossier! We hope these final things will be received within 4 to 6 weeks.

Urgent Prayer Request
Friends you may have read this on Facebook. When our paperwork is done, we will owe the next payment to our agency. The amount due will be $4000. Right now, we have a commitment from a family member to cover a quarter of that cost. Would you please join us in prayer that we will continue to receive financial support from friends and family who have received our support letter? I truly believe that with God’s provision, we can finish 2009 without taking on any loans. Please pray specifically for the $3000 that we’ll need in the next 6 weeks or so.

Shortly following that, there will be an even larger payment due to Nepal as our paperwork goes overseas in December or January. But we’ll take things one step at a time.

If you would like to be a part of the journey, donations are being accepted at our agency! Please mail a check payable to La Vida International along with a note stating it is for the Jay & Brooke Collins adoption from Nepal to:

La Vida International

150 S. Warner Rd. Ste. 144

King of Prussia, PA 19406

Thank you for your continued support! More updates to come as we finish this final section of our dossier.

Seeing the End

Last week on September 11 we remembered the fellow Americans we lost. But this year we found a tremendous reason to celebrate with the arrival of our friend's adopted daughter who came home from Ethiopia! Welcome to the land of the free and the home of the brave, sweet girl! It was an incredible event to witness and we were honored to be allowed to see her when she came off the plane in her daddy's arms. What a vision of God... "a Father to the fatherless."

Seeing the end of the process puts things into perspective and renews our passion for adoption in the midst of paperwork.

We checked more things off our list recently and I haven't written about them -- adoption training courses. We're required to take 2 online courses, totalling about 10 hours of training. Our agency also shipped us a huge file of about 55 articles that they required us to read. Some of the courses and articles would scare anyone with casual interest in adoption. Titles such as Reactive Attachment Disorder, Hepatitis and Other Communicable Diseases, and You're Not My Real Mother, are tough to swallow. The learning is helpful and I'm grateful for it. It gives us more to pray for and more to be prepared for on this adventure. But it does not scare us away! This is the path God has us on and we'll follow Him to the end.

This week we'll put paperwork on hold as we celebrate C's 6th birthday. We'll celebrate at home on his big day and he'll have a party with 8 boys from school and church on Saturday out at a local indoor playpark. We also have his school carnival/fundraiser on Friday night. So, we're a little swamped this week!

Next week we'll send our passports off for renewal and we'll order the final birth certificates and marriage certificates. Once we're done with those things, we won't be done with the dossier per se, but the things we'll be waiting for will be out of our control, so we'll just wait until everything slowly comes in.

One way you could pray for us this week is that our home study social worker would receive Jay's police clearances from the State of Florida. She is also still waiting for our FBI clearances to arrive and she mentioned that those have been backed up for quite some time. So, we'd like to see those come in this week so that the home study can be officially behind us and added to our dossier.

Thanks for checking in and have a great week!

Welcome to Our Blog!

Hello to all our friends across the globe! Most of you have heard by now that Jay and I are planning to adopt a daughter from Nepal next year. We have created this blog as a way for you to keep track of where we are in that process, what you can be praying for during the journey and other ways you can help. The paperwork will start in just a few weeks! In the meantime, I thought I could take some time to answer just a few preliminary questions this month. I'll try to update this at least once a week, perhaps on Sunday after church. Thanks for visiting us!


Why Adoption?
With 2 handsome, healthy boys at home, I’m sure some of you out there wonder why we’d consider adoption in the first place.

Our 2 pregnancies were wonderful and we didn’t experience any major medical complications! But both our boys were born by c-section and a body can only take so much. My doctor in Lincoln told me that 3 c-sections were about all I should consider.

So, couldn’t we just try again for a girl one more time? Sure. But I don’t think I’m ready for that yet. I’m not exactly ready to be “done” having kids at this point. I love being pregnant and I’m still young and have time on my side. We desire a girl and trying one more time gives us a 50-50 chance. Adoption gives us a 100% chance of having a girl!

I believe our move to Lincoln was a huge influence in our decision to adopt as well. While we had always talked about adoption, especially with Jay having grown up with his foster brother Ron, and the year I spent in Japan, it was always just a thought in the back of our minds.

Currently, we have numbers of other friends here in town who are also in their own adoption journey. This is simply a cause felt deep in the heart of our community. In our life group from church alone, we have one family who already adopted from Ethiopia, 1 other family considering private domestic adoption, and our leaders are also investigating their options to expand their family! The list doesn’t stop there as we know even more people who have created their homes for multi-racial children. What a great place to raise a child!

We have heard the need. We are answering the call.