Monday, April 30, 2007

Heartbroken

It is with great sadness that I read today that the Children's Ministry in Ethiopia has decided to limit the size of families adopting to no more than 5 children (under 18) living in the home at the time of adoption. The good news is that families already in the process will be allowed to finish regardless of family size. And as my wise husband said, "Well then, we're lucky that we got the two we already did." However, this puts a bit of a wrench into our plans to adopt again from Ethiopia anytime in the near future.
To rub salt in an already open wound, we had our final post-placement visit with our social worker, who as she was standing on my doorstep said goodbye, added "Everything here seems great--you guys definitely SHOULD do this again!" As luck would have it, I had even emailed our agency's director today to request an "updated" packet of information on their Ethiopia program. I've yet to hear back from her, but I guess there's no rush at this point.
So, I guess now we're kind of back at square one...just waiting and praying to see what God's got up his big ol' white-robed sleeve for us.

3 comments:

Julie Cooper said...

This is horrible news. What makes me concerned, too, about this decision is that most couples who are childless want to adopt very small children/babies. (I'm not knocking this as I adopted my first two children when they were infants.) So what happens to the older orphans? Many of the older children of Ethiopia are adopted by larger-than-the-average size family. Maybe I'm missing something here, but logic tells me that this decision will cause demand for older children to take a nose dive. This is very sad, and I'm very sorry for you and Pat.

5KidMom said...

I just read today that AAI has a program in Ghana. Apparently the same restriction does not apply there, because the family I heard it from are in process, and WAY over Ethiopia's new limit. Just a thought. 8^)

Jane (a.k.a. patjrsmom) said...

Thank you both for the encouragement and support. We're just going to keep our minds and hearts open and see where God leads us. He's done us okay so far and I can't think He'd let us down now!