God Opens a Door

We had always thought we would adopt a baby from Latin America.  My mother is from Trinidad and so it just seemed natural to have that desire.  Others said, "What about Ethiopia?"  I said, "No, we really want to adopt from Latin America."  But every country we looked at was a closed door.  Then one day, I turned and looked, and said, "OK, what about Ethiopia?" 

In June of this year, we contacted Celebrate Children International.  They were the same agency we called when we were interested in adopting from Guatemala.  The doors swung open so fast it almost made my head spin!  I equated the feeling at the time as to being on one of those people movers in the airport.  Even when we were standing still, it felt like we were moving fast!

We had talked to other agencies about Ethiopia as well, but in the end decided on Celebrate Children.  Sue Hedberg and Angela Vance have been awesome!  Above and beyond everything else, it is obvious that the children are their first priority.   In fact, when I first called to sign up in June, Sue was in Ethiopia with the children and has been back several times.

We explained to them that we had been saving all of the money from our little business since last year, and that when our home study was completed, then we would be able to apply for Adoption Grants, in order to fund the rest.  Our Social Worker at the time, told us, we only needed to tell them what country we had decided on and give them the country specific information, and then they could complete our homestudy.   Celebrate Childen was more than willing to give us whatever information we needed.

They invited us to look at the Waiting Children list.  And of course we looked for a little boy and a little girl, with dark skin and dark hair. 

There was this one little boy.  The description of him said,  "...this sad little boy."  He did look sad.  All I wanted to do was pick him up and hug him.   He was one year old at the time. 

But there was no one little girl.  They asked us if we would consider sibling sisters.  We looked at the list and fell in love with two little sisters, ages 2 and 4.

God had at last opened a door!