The following post was submitted by a CWA family.  If you are interested in allowing us to post your adoption-related story with our readers, please let me know!

Our journey of adoption began in an unlikely place – the plains of Dire Dawa Kezira in Ethiopia.  In February 2005, we began sponsoring a child named Henok from Ethiopia through Compassion International.  Compassion is a wonderful ministy that has the mission of “Releasing children from poverty in Jesus’ name.”  At the time, Henok was 5 years old.  On August 17 of this year, he will turn 10.  This will be the 5th birthday we get to celebrate for Henok!  At that time, we were pregnant with our second child.  I thought great – all we need now is a dog and we’re done.

We received periodic magazines from Compassion International.  Through learning more about the state of the rest of the world—poverty, orphans and sickness—our hearts began to dwell on adoption.

We began to talk about adoption with our children.  Our son was hoping for several brothers.  Our daughter just wanted to make sure she got a little sister out of the deal.  We would go weeks without discussing adoption, and one of them would bring it up… wanting to know when they would be here.  It took us a season to pray about it, but ultimately we knew this was a precious path we should head down.  In the summer of 2008 while on a business trip with my husband in Huntsville, AL, we met with another CWA Family.  This family has adopted nine children – two from Texas and seven from Russia.  After meeting with this family, we felt both a peace about using CWA as our agency and selecting Russia as our country.

On October 26, 2008, as a family of 4 at Pizza Hut, we decided to become a family of 6 – well, 7 if you count our dog Major and they always do.  That night we submitted our application online to CWA and by the next night I had our neighbor and friend notarizing documents.

On Thanksgiving, our six year old son surprised the family by telling them he was thankful for his new brother and sister from Russia.  By Christmas, we had finished our home study.  By January, our initial Dossier was complete.  As of April 3, 2009, our documents are in Krasnoyarsk, Russia and have been translated and given to the Russian authorities.  For now, we are just waiting patiently (most of the time) to meet and bring home our children.