The adoption journey is full of many knowns. It can be a long road in which you have very little control over. While things can and do go wrong, you do your research and follow your heart knowing that God will lead you on the path you are meant to be on.
In February 2011 when we began our journey, we were ecstatic to find an orphanage in Colombia that would work with us. We had always hoped to adopt from Colombia again, but most orphanages in Colombia prefer to work with families that either have no children or just one child in the household. Lucky for us, the Los Pisingos orphanage was open to larger families. Los Pisingos was a well established orphanage. We knew many families who had adopted through Los Pisingos and they all had great things to say. So we followed our hearts and spent many months gathering all the very important documents needed to adopt from Colombia (called a dossier). We submitted our dossier to Los Pisingos in October of 2011.
Our dossier sat at Los Pisingos for one year when we got the first piece of news that you never want to hear on your adoption journey. The Colombian government was shutting down the Los Pisingos orphanage. The founder's son had been running the orphanage and they had discovered that he had been embezzling funds from the orphanage. All dossiers that had been at Los Pisingos were being transferred to the Colombian Welfare program (ICBF). Adoptions for a child under 3 years of age through ICBF was taking over 5 years. So we had a choice to make, leave our dossier with ICBF or find another private orphanage.
Following our hearts once again, we wrote a letter to FANA (the orphanage that Owen was adopted from), asking, hoping and praying that they would accept our family into their program. And they said YES!! We were so very grateful and thrilled to once again be a FANA waiting family. We knew in our hearts that our child would be at FANA. And we put our trust in God that He would continue to lead us where we needed to be.
We would wait another 2 years until we would get the call we had been dreaming of for so very long. On January 30, 2015 the phone rang with the news we had been waiting to hear...It's a girl! We were overjoyed! We read over all the pages and pages of paperwork that comes along with the referral of a child - the birth certificate, medical history, court proceedings. But it was the photo that captivated our hearts. The picture of the beautiful baby girl...our daughter.
I must look at our daughter's photo over 100 times a day. It seems like I've been staring into those big brown eyes forever, like she's always been a part of our family. We've fallen head over heals in love with our little Rose. She is our blessing from Heaven.
After our roller coaster of an adoption journey, we thought nothing else could possibly go wrong... until we got another call on Friday, February 6th. We had somehow been given the wrong referral! There were two little girls being referred at the same time and somehow they mixed up the babies. All the documents we had received were not for our daughter, but for a different little girl. The only thing correct in the entire packet of documents was the photo. The photo was our daughter! But everything we thought we knew about her was wrong. I was shocked, confused and scared. Scared that we may lose our baby girl. We no longer had an official referral, only a photo of our beautiful daughter Rose.
The next week would seem like an eternity as we worried and wondered what would happen. Would we get the referral of our daughter? Would someone somewhere along the line not sign off on the paperwork? We likely had no reason to worry, but after all the bumps in the road we knew that the unexpected could happen.
Today (Thursday, February 12th) we received the most amazing news!! All our corrected referral documents had been sent to our agency! We now have everything we need to start moving forward. We are so thankful that FANA discovered the error so soon in the process. It was clearly "by some message from God" as Maria Teresa Maldonado from FANA wrote in her email to our agency. I've spoken with our Officer at Immigration and we'll be able to mail our revised documents directly to her. Normally we'd have to send them to a lock box and it would take 10+ days to be routed to our officer. So we are keeping our fingers crossed that our travel date won't be delayed.
We are so relieved to have the paperwork issues resolved! We cannot wait until we can finally hold our daughter!! Stay tuned for more to come on our official referral - Take 2!!
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