For almost a year we have been working on our dossier. This consisted of our home study, adoption trainings, physicals and blood work for Mandi and I, a 600 question psych eval, bank statements, background checks and fingerprinting, documents from The U.S Citizenship and Immigration department to approve us for adoption, a personal letter written to the Haitian government requesting to adopt from their country and about a dozen other items that are required to adopt from Haiti. We are excited to announce that it is completed and has made it safely to Haiti. Any day now we should be notified that our dossier has been “legalized” by Haiti's foreign affairs making our dossier officially registered and that will put us in the waiting period. It is uncertain how long we will be waiting for a referral. While we wait we still have a lot to do. We have more adoption training that needs to be completed. This training will help us better understand some of the difficulties we might face with adoption. On top of this training, we have documents that will expire and need to be renewed and updated. So even though our dossier is complete we will still be working to keep everything up to date. Another item on our list while we wait is finding a pediatrician who specializes in international adoption (preferably Haitian adoptions). Once we have a referral we will have 2 weeks to review and either accept or decline. Having a doctor lined up to review the medical documents of the referred child is necessary. We also will begin to prepare our home for this child. Since we won’t know the age or gender until we have a referral there’s not a lot we can do but we have started collecting some furniture and also studying Haitian cooking.
Over this past year we have seen God work in some very amazing ways. I’d like to share a few of them with you. As most of you know, international adoption is very expensive. Early on in the process while talking with our Pastor I mentioned ideas of refinancing our house or other loans to pay for it. Our pastor quickly shot those ideas down and said God will provide. We chose not to pursue loans or borrowing money and decided to trust God to provide. We started a fundraiser at Adopttogether.org and sent it out to friends, family, our church and social media. We were blown away by the response. God provided! Within the first couple months around $30,000 was raised. Our church did a “Soup and Sweets” fundraiser and raised another $4,000. On top of that, multiple people have sent us money to put towards our travel fees for when we go to Haiti to meet our future child.
Gathering all the needed documents during the “pandemic” proved to be very difficult. Every document needed to be notarized and then sent to Harrisburg to be State Certified. Hiring a mobile notary to follow us to every appointment, meeting, or business to have dozens of documents notarized would have cost a fortune. But God provided! Not just one but two of our close friends were both willing and able to help us, sometimes with only a few hours notice. We were able to get almost all of the documents notarized for free.