Sunday, October 19, 2014

Peter

After we brought Simon and Jed home in 2012, we thought our family was complete.  That is until this sweet face popped up on our agency's 'waiting children' website.  Not that I had any business looking at that website, but old habits die hard.  I first asked to see Peter's file in November 2012.     In January 2013, Jerry and I went away for an anniversary weekend and one of the things we were praying about was whether we were supposed to do anything about Peter  We didn't have an answer so I advocated for him a bit on a few adoption sites.   In May 2013, one evening I was on Facebook and in the right hand column where you can sometimes see strangers say things to your friends, someone asked Tracy Worrell, an adoptive mom who I have never actually met (but who is an expert on adoption of deaf children ) if she would consider hosting a child from China.   I was familiar, at that time with summer host programs from Eastern Europe, but I had never heard of one from China.   As God would have it,  when I found the website, guess whose picture was among the 30 or so children who were in the first summer host program from China.   Jerry says that the odds that of the tens of thousands of children living in orphanages in China, that one of the kids chosen for the first visit from a rather remote orphanage would be Peter is mathematically improbable.  So God had our attention. A bit of paperwork and a few thousand dollars later, he arrived for a six week stay.  We were forbidden to mention anything about adoption.
By this time, Peter's paperwork was with another agency, so I contacted our agency to see if they could get it back.  Even so, in his first weeks with us,  we were still entirely ambivalent about adopting him.  He was difficult.  stubborn. resistant.   I had six (often seven) absolutely lovely children, heading into teenage years and I was afraid to rock the boat.   However, as the summer went on and he became less afraid, he also became more compliant.  By the time he left, we were all sorry to see him go and I think he was sorry to leave.  Dominic says he is 85% certain that he will want to leave everything he has known and be adopted.   In 48 hours we will know.


This is the most recent picture we have of him,sent from China.
How do you explain to an 11 year old the reason it took 15 months to come for him ? How to tell him that I filled out every piece of paperwork for him the day it arrived in my hands but that it sat on desks in both China and America for days, weeks, months.  I have seen an adoption done from China in weeks, why is this not the norm?  Why do these children wait?

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