Answer to Prayer!!

As I'm sure most of you reading this know, a month after we moved to Rwanda the Ministry stopped accepting dossiers. This was because they signed the Hague Agreement and needed to make changes to their system to meet all the requirements of that agreement. It was very discouraging at the time. Things typically move slowly here in Africa and we anticipated that they would not reopen for a couple of years. Over the last few months we have tried to stay current with what is going on at the Ministry and have even researched adoption programs of neighboring countries.

One of the huge changes for us with the process is that we will now need to go through an agency instead of being able to adopt independantly. I started researching the handful of agencies in the States who have Rwanda programs and became encouraged. We were planning to gather documents for our dossier when we are in the States this summer thinking that Rwanda may reopen in 9-12 months. We thought we could get a jump on a few things. Then, I started to get more and more positive information about the program. I finally called Children of All Nations (CAN) adoption agency. I was telling them our plan to work on things this summer and the wonderful woman I spoke with told me that the Ministry told them they plan to reopen in June or July. Now this is Africa so let's just be real and say August or September. Either way...so much sooner than we thought! CAN is the only agency I found that is actually accepting applicants right now. They said that we could apply now, start working on our dossier and have it done and ready to submit when Rwanda reopens. Hopefully, we will be at the front of the line this time!

So, we completed the application Thursday night and were accepted on Friday. We are officially Paper Pregnant once again! I find it hard to believe that we are actually, finally starting another paperchase after all this time.

The big thing that we need to figure out is our homestudy. When expats have adopted in the past, the Ministry has sent a social worker to the house to do a homestudy. We are praying that this will still be the case. It will save us, I'm guessing, $2-3000 if we can have a Ministry SW come to the house instead of flying in a SW from Europe. I am planning to go to the Ministry this week sometime to find out what we need to do. Please be praying that we can do this all through the Ministry.

And...I promise that I have not forgotten about the shopping post. I have been gathering info about baby products and pricing. I will have everything for you soon!