Posts
All Comments
All,
It has occurred to me that we (ok, I) forgot to send a couple of
photos of the little ones. We have attached them here.
John and Beth
(The pictures cannot be posted on the blog at this time)
We have been in Vologograd for the last day. Its hot here and there isn't much air conditioning. The shower in our hotel room is, well interesting (we will send you a picture). Nontheless we are marching on.
We received a match for two boys and later traveled to the orphanage where they are located. We spent some time with each of them, and the long and the short of it is, we have a match.
More details later. Thank you for praying for us, please continue to do so. We covet and appreciate each one of you and the work you are doing on our behalf.
We arrived yesterday at noon and promptly slept off the trip (for about 4 hours). We are safe and off to visit red square before traveling to our region later today. (In-country flights are always an ... experience:)
Thank you for praying and please continue to do so.
We love you guys
Hey everyone! Thanks for all the prayers, encouragement, emails, and phone calls we have received from you guys. You guys are awesome!
The good news is that we received our visas today and should be heading to Russia as planned. The bad news is that we just got word from our adoption coordinator that the Duma in Russia (kind of like our Senate) is meeting on Sept. 5 to discuss enacting a moratorium on adoptions in Russia. What does this mean for us??
Since Russia is a two trip adoption country, a moratorium would obviously keep us from going on our second trip to bring the children home. At this point, no one knows if a moratorium would be for 2 months or 6 months or how long it would be and how it would affect families already in the adoption process (ie not those families still waiting for referrals).
At this point, our coordinator has told us to definitely expect a longer wait between trips 1 and 2. The wait is normally about 3 months but a moratorium would obviously make this a much lengthier process. So, all that said, please keep us in your prayers.
As mentioned earlier, please pray for discernment while we are there. In addition, please pray that God would protect our hearts, that he would help us to trust Him completely despite the negatives, and finally please pray that a moratorium would not be put into effect as there are many families in our same position.
Thanks so much for being so supportive!
Love ya,
Beth and John
Here is an update to the current situation we received:
Again, we are saddened to hear yet of another potential case of abuse of a child adopted from Russia. For more information concerning the case, please visit here. It breaks our hearts to know that anyone would harm a precious child entrusted to them through adoption.
To date, thirteen children who have been adopted from Russia have died. In each case, a parent was either accused or convicted of the murder. These high profile cases, at least three in the last six months, have slowed down adoptions by 1/3 this year compared to the number of adoptions in 2004. Since 1992, just over 44,000 children have been adopted to US families. To read more concerning the history of delays please go to this.
The JCICS shares some very good tips on how to wait with grace and patience as we weather the changes in adoption policies in Russia. Please go to this to gain some helpful information. We understand that the delays which have occurred in the past, and perhaps which will be applied in the future, are frustrating since so much is out of our agencies control and depend on decisions made by the Ministry of Education and Science. Currently, only 27 of the over 90 agencies working in Russia have been reaccredited.
It is our desire to bring your children as quickly as possible, therefore we are looking at creative solutions to partner with other agencies as reaccredidation delays press on.
As Christians, we also have a very valuable resource of encouragement and empowerment through the adoption journey, that is prayer. Please take a moment to read the devotional and pray for the children who are delayed from being united with their parents at this time.
Praying for your family today,
We have been really slack lately about keeping everyone up to date on our Russian adoption, so here is one update. We were out of town last week at the beach in NC with my family. We received a call from our adoption coordinator while we were at the beach telling us that they wanted us to travel to Russia on Aug 15th.
We came back early from our vacation and are getting everything weneed to get done before we go. We will be in Russia Aug 15-20 and possibly a little longer depending on what happens while we are there. This trip will be to receive referrals of children and we will go back on a second trip to adopt the children. There is a possibility that we could not find a child we want to adopt while weare there. It will be an emotionally intense time.
Please pray that we would have safety as we travel and that we wouldbe given discernment in the referral process. Our prayer is that God would be glorified no matter what the outcome and we would not beoverwhelmed by circumstances, etc. We will keep you guys updated and appreciate your prayers!
Read more...On Wednesday, July 28, Leslie, our adoption coordinator, phoned us at work via a conference call. We had been told that we would know a match had occurred when our coordinator places a conference call to both spouses. We did not receive a match, however we were told that we had been give the opportunity to travel blind to our region: Volgograd, Russia.
Traveling blind entails traveling without a specific match to a child. This means that when one arrives in the region a match is made at the Ministry of Education where the prospective parents then travel to the orphanage and decide if the child is the right one for their family. The benefit of doing it this way is that there is very little time between match and visitation. You actually see the child very quickly. The down side is that one is not guaranteed a child. And the worst case is not finding a child.
Two days later, (Friday) we decided, after some thought and prayer, we would travel blind; at this point we believed that more than likely this decision would not matter. We heard through several sources that recent law changes in the Duma would make it impossible to adopt in Russia without working through an accredited agency. The umbrella agency our agency works through was previously accredited and is in "good" standing to become re-accredited. However, has yet to be re-accredited.
Two cases in the US, (one in Illinois the other in North Carolina), involving the death of an adopted child by their parent resulted in a delay in issuing accreditations by the Moscow prosecutor. The prosecutor, facing political pressure delayed issuing accreditations to the second group of agencies working in Russia.
We were told that traveling blind would most likely not happen. However Leslie told us she would be looking into the issue further and determine what "really" was going on.
On Monday, July 25, we heard word that the region we were working in was "unaffected" by the law changes and we could travel as an independent on our first trip. So here we go again. On Thursday, July 28 we had a conference call with Leslie and the Eastern Europe coordinator, Debbie. The purpose was to understand the risk in blind travel. We asked if traveling would occur soon so we would know if our yearly trip to a North Carolina beach would need to be cancelled. We were told to go ahead and travel because Leslie would be on vacation and the soonest we would hear on travel dates would be after she returned (August 8th).
We made plans to travel and arrived at the beach on August 2, at about four in the morning. Usually it takes one or two days to completely relax and be absorbed by the sunshine, ocean air, and lazy atmosphere.
Two days later, August 4, Beth was awakened (granted it was 10 am) by a phone call from Debbie who indicated that we would need to travel to Moscow on the 16th of August. The only catch was that the individual who would walk our Visa application through the Russian embassy was leaving on vacation on the 6th and would require our application the next day if we were to receive it before our intended travel dates.
We called our travel agent, Cathy, and asked her to make reservations for the trip.
Have you ever tried to find a computer with internet access, a place to obtain passport style photos, money orders, and a Fedex drop location in an area designed for relaxing and escaping such devices? The first problem was our application and our passports were waiting at home for our return. We coordinated with the facilitator in Maryland that two packages would be arriving: one containing our passports, the other containing the money orders, passport photos, and visa applications.
Our friends, Mike and Kate, were house/dog sitting for us and graciously agreed to send the passports to the facilitator. Kate sent the completed applications, still saved on our computer, to our email address. We found the Brunswick Business Center down the road about 5 miles from where we stay. We attempted to download the completed applications. The business center did not allow Hotmail attachments to be downloaded.
We downloaded the original application from the Russian embassy site. Over the next hour, Mike relayed over the phone the information in the completed application. We complete the application and printed it. We needed to pay the business center in cash, cash we did not have. So we found our bank's ATM, (so as to avoid those fees), returned to the center, and paid.
About a block down the street, we found a Walgreens that provides passport photos. We had our visa photos taken and then we needed to find a branch of our bank in the area. We drove 20 minutes to the location where the bank was and then another 20 minutes to the new location. There we negotiated a free Fedex envelope with the receptionist (they are always free), waited in the teller line (for a while), and walked out with three money orders for the two visas and facilitator.
We put the items in the envelope and drove 30 minutes to a town in South Carolina where the Fedex ship center was located. We dropped off the envelope and headed home to shower and get ready for a trip to Wilmington for dinner. We called Cathy back to confirm the trip reservations.
Back at the ranch John had a mild panic attack because he forgot a from that was required for all males entering Russia. With a quick call to Debbie (remember Leslie is on vacation), we determined that the form was no longer needed and we could resume our vacation.
We left the beech on Saturday, August 6th, at 8 am and boarded a plane for home 10 hours later. Three days early.
© Blogger templates The Professional Template by Ourblogtemplates.com 2008
Back to TOP
