I am passionate about adoption and the kids who need families and my hope is that by sharing our adoption, we will help others have a glimpse of our story- our experience, decisions, and preparations, as well as give insight into how the international adoption experience works and some of the needs in the international adoption world. I hope you will follow along!
If you read my last post on how we decided to adopt (you can find it here), then you might have caught that we did not originally plan to adopt from Vietnam.
Like I shared, our hearts were really opened to International Adoption through a blog of a family who had adopted from China. Over the next few years, we had quite a few people who came into our life who had adopted from China or who were adopted from China. After all of those experiences, we just felt like that was where God was leading us and so that is where we intended to adopt from, however, when started having the feeling that it was time to start the process, I wasn’t 30 yet so we did not meet the eligibility requirements to adopt from China.
Admittedly, it was hard at first for me to shift gears and consider other countries. In my mind and heart, that is where I had been preparing to adopt from, and so for some silly reason (probably because I hate change) it was hard for me to let go of China as our adoption country. I even reached out to an adoption agency who works with adoptions from China to see if any exceptions could be made. When we had a firm answer (NO) but still felt like we should be adopting now, our next step was looking into ALL of the countries you can adopt from, and narrowing down our choices, here’s about how that process went although much less formal and done in PJs at night when the kids were in bed:
Step 1: Look at or make giant list of all of the countries that you can adopt from if you’re American. (We already knew we wanted to do international).
Step 2: Start going down the list and seeing if we are even eligible. The age requirement (most countries both parents have to be 30) made it really easy to narrow our list down quickly. The minimum age to adopt internationally is 25, so we looked for countries with a minimum age requirement of 25.
Step 3: Really delve into the countries that were left. If I remember correctly we looked at a few countries in South America, a few in Asia, and one in Africa. Each country has a dozen different requirements, and as ones came up that we didn’t meet or weren’t comfortable with, we stopped considering that country (For example, some countries you have to be there for months to complete the adoption process and we couldn’t do that so those countries were out). All of this was also accompanied by a lot of prayer and a lot of Netlfixing while I researched at night. We also had some priorities like we wanted to pursue a special needs adoption and adopt from a country that actually had a need for adoptive families. If you are like me, you’ll repeat this step like 80 times because that’s the same thing you do when trying to choose a restaurant for date night.
Step 4: We had a few countries left on our list, and were even still wafering between delaying our adoption longer, but we kept coming back to Vietnam. Everytime I started to look at another country, my mind and my searches kept going back to Vietnam.
You definitely should not base your country choices off of food but good food is a fun part of the adoption visit. We loved trying so many different kinds of food in Vietnam.
Step 5: We started seriously looking into agencies and waiting child list from Vietnam. I was researching every single night for hours. We decided that if our minds kept going back to Vietnam over and over that it must be God bringing us back to it and so we would start focusing on that country and see where it lead us. We became familiar with their waiting child list and asked questions about the two agencies we were considering. We did not commit officially to a country or agency until we saw Toan on RainbowKids (a website of waiting children internationally), were approved to be eligible to adopt from Vietnam, and saw his file. The rest is history!
If you are considering international adoption and want a great resource for comparing all of the different countries and their requirements, look for a list of the current Hague Convention countries. The most important thing in choosing a country and an agency is making sure that you focus on an ethical adoption and finding a country and agency that will put ethics first and only adopting from Hague Countries is an important part of that, although not all countries in the Hague convention are currently doing adoptions, but it’s a good place to start. Next up on the adoption series will be how to choose an agency!
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