Adopting from Ethiopia

This is the first guest post on the process of choosing a country to adopt from. Thank you SO much Emily for writing this. You should all go check out her blog, Our Little Buster. Emily is a fabulous woman, and I'm so excited for her and her husband and their adoption process.

“Why Ethiopia?”

It is certainly a question we get asked frequently and is one of the harder questions about our adoption to wrap up into a succinct answer. I would like to say that all of the reasons were romantic and beautiful, but that wouldn’t be honest. When my husband, Damon, and I first started investigating adoption there were several factors that we felt we needed to consider. For example, as unfortunate as it is to admit we had to think about the cost, the length of the process and travel requirements. It is expensive and time consuming no matter what, but some countries require two trips and their country fees are higher so we had to think about all of that. I also knew that I didn’t have it in me to wait for years and years just for a referral so I was hopeful we could find a country with more reasonable wait times. I think some people pick the country and then search for agencies that facilitate adoptions in that particular country.

However, we ended up landing on an agency first and then deciding based on the options they had. We had heard a lot of good things about Gladney and we felt very strongly about picking an agency with proven experience and strong ethics. When we had the agency determined we just needed to figure out what country.

We had been thinking about adoption for a while. Even before we started any serious research, whenever I visualized myself adopting it was always from Africa. I wasn’t even sure if it was possible, but when I would daydream about it the child was always from Africa. I am not sure if that is because Damon’s father is African-American so it seemed like a good fit for us or what? If you read my blog then you have heard this story, but it was a defining moment in our process. One day I came home from work and Damon told me he had been doing further research into countries where Gladney facilitates adoptions. He told me had a video he wanted me to watch and he warned me that it made him a little teary. I knew that it was a big deal because he is not one to show emotions. It was a video on Gladney’s website of a young couple’s trip to Ethiopia and there were lots of shots of the capital where they stayed. Then they took a trip to see where their son was found. At the end of the video they are in a room waiting and eventually they are introduced to their son for the first time. I just had tears streaming down my face and realized I just watched them become a family. It was very overwhelming. I looked up at Damon and he told me that he wanted to adopt from Ethiopia. It was a moment I will never forget. Damon said that he was just feeling this pull towards Ethiopia, but thought we should wait a few days and just make sure. We both admitted to each other a few days later that when we went to bed we were thinking about Ethiopia and when we woke up in the morning we were thinking about Ethiopia and when we were getting a glass of water we were thinking about Ethiopia. We knew then it was time to recognize what was on our hearts and it was time to act. That night we filled out the online application.

I truly felt such peace with our decision. So much of adoption and actually parenthood in general is such a leap of faith. You make the decisions to the best of your ability and then just have to go for it. What shocks me is how I have gone from hardly ever thinking about Ethiopia nine months ago to thinking about it all the time. My world view has totally changed and Ethiopia plays a factor in so much of what I do from Christmas shopping to internet surfing to daydreaming, etc. I am so grateful to be on this journey and to be forever connected to Ethiopia.