On Tuesdays, we take time to focus on some of our families that have received grants from Katelyn's Fund. May you be blessed by their stories…..
We have been married for 10 years and have been blessed with 3 beautiful biological children. We have always talked about adopting, but somehow we were still caught off guard when we felt that God was moving us toward starting the adoption process last November. We attended an adoption and orphan care conference where we met Carolyn Tweetmeyer, the Director of Project Hopeful, an agency that advocates for the adoption and care of children living with HIV. As we learned about the death sentence that HIV is in the developing world and how treatable it is in the States we knew that it was the right time for our family to adopt a child with this particular special need. A week later we had filed an application to adopt a baby girl from Ethiopia.
We made it through the mountains of paperwork and in June we were rewarded with a referral for a beautiful little girl who we decided to name Ruby. We got to meet her in July on our first trip to Ethiopia for our court date. She is around 18 months old and has a very serious personality, but is also very sweet and has a lot of spunk, and we fell in love with her at first sight.
The International Adoption process has many hurdles that, when we first began, seemed to be insurmountable. There are the piles of paperwork, the whims of a foreign countries adoption program, and the financial burdens. We had absolutely no idea how we would ever be able to cover all of the fees required to bring a little one home and we soon realized something important…we could not do it alone. Our community stepped up and has given so much of their time and resources to help us fundraise, but that still wasn’t enough, which led us to applying for adoption grants. Our family is so grateful to Katelyn’s Fund, who has both prayerfully and financially supported our adoption. And we especially thank an amazing God who has graciously provided for our family throughout this journey and has been preparing us for welcoming home our daughter.
