Rwanda Adoption News

I found myself very emotional at church this morning. I was surrounded by beautiful Rwandan children looking at me with their huge brown eyes. All I could think about was our son. I wondered if he is born yet. Who his mother is and where does she live? Have I walked by her at the market?

I think that it hit me more today than other days because it was recently announced that Rwanda is no longer accepting dossiers as of Tuesday. They have signed the Hague Agreement which long term is great news for children. It will protect them against harm and eliminate corruption from the system. The sad and upsetting news is for those families who are currently in the process of preparing their dossiers. For us, we have put things a bit on hold until we get settled in to our life here in Rwanda so it isn't as devastating to us as it is for many families. We have heard that there are about 150 dossiers waiting at the Ministry office to be processed. In my mind, having been through a Chinese adoption where there are tens of thousands of dossiers waiting to be processed, that doesn't seem like a lot. But, I can also completely understand how they feel. It doesn't matter if there are 30,000 or 3 dossiers in front of yours. You just want your child home in your arms.

So, we will just have to wait and see what happens. We have no idea how long the process of accreditation will take. We just have to trust God. Again...the biggest lesson we learned while waiting for our sweet Emma was...God's timing is Perfect timing.

Leaving on a Jet Plane

Monday, August 2 we woke up in our hotel room just outside LAX at 4AM. We had an 8:30 AM flight and wanted to make sure we had plenty of time to get all of our bags checked in. We had 10 check bags and 6 carry-ons. Insane! We actually took up the entire luggage rack on the shuttle to the airport.

As I mentioned before we left, we have been praying that our bags would make it under 50lbs each so that we would not be charged $400 extra per bag. Matt and I specifically prayed that morning that our check in agent’s eyes would be blind to the scale or that he/she would be very generous. Well, one of the too happened. Half of our bags were 53lbs and the rest were 50lbs. She didn’t charge us anything extra for being over the weight limit. She just smiled and rolled them through. Praise God!

At our gate we met Jennifer. She is from LA and is also a new teacher here at KICS. We were hoping to have time to chat with her in DC but our flight was late and we almost missed our connection. When I say almost missed, I mean we were literally sprinting through Dulles flagging down the agent as she said, “last call for Brussels.” It was complete OJ Simpson style. Once we got settled on the plane we realized the Jennifer was not on the plane. She ended up missing the flight and had to stay in DC until Thursday...along with our 10 bags of checked luggage!

We had a 4 hour layover in Brussels. They have these great, however dirty, play areas for kids. Fantastic idea! Emma had a blast playing with the touch screens and running around with the other kids. It was perfect timing for her since we were pretty much on a plane for 13 hour straight from LA to Brussels minus or quick sprint down the hall in DC.

She did amazingly well on all 3 flights. She hardly even fussed. She slept most of the flight from Brussels to Kigali which really through off her sleep schedule since we arrived at 7pm. She woke up at 4 the next morning. She is now sleeping through the night and not getting up until 6-6:30, which is still early for her.

When we arrived in Kigali at 7pm on Tuesday, we came down the stairs to the baggage claim area only to be greeted by this sign. We finally got our luggage late Thursday night. It flew in from DC with Jennifer.

Emma at 5AM with our luggage ready to go!

Playing with the touch screen in Brussels

Yes, those are our names.