Disclaimer! I will often write “I” instead of “we” because I am the crazy-chronic-researcher and Husband is the level headed researcher-taker-inner and I write from my perspective; however, I’ve always presented all info to Husband and we've mutually come to agreement!
Why Ethiopia?
We were focused on an Asian country initially because that was all we knew. Moving down from Portland a few years back, it was very common to see families with adopted children from an Asian country. I (we) did not feel a particular affinity for Taiwan, but it felt more or less a norm for internationally adoption, so that's what we went with.
Fast forward 2 years and knowing that our adoption was dissolving, I started seriously researching new countries to adopt from. I can now say with an honest heart that I began to have hesitation with our Taiwan adoption even before the agency red flags. Taiwan is a country that has steadily emerged from a 3rd world and have recently implemented a functional intercountry foster care and adoption program so that they can place their own kids within country. I might blog at another time about my feelings of the pros and cons of international adoption, but for the sake of this topic, I can tell you that the reasons for adopting (touching upon it above) from Taiwan was starting to weigh more within the “cons” category.
I obsessively started researching countries that I felt had a valid need to adopt their orphans. This was happening during the Haiti disaster. With all of the talk of the orphans that needed adopting (or were in process) from there, Husband and I started discussing how it would be for us to adopt an African American child. It was a different mind set than Asia, so it was hard to imagine initially. We sat on the idea for a few weeks and I contacted friends (and friends of friends!) that had adopted black children in our state. Let's face it, Utah is a very white state, so even though we knew were could love a white, brown, black, red, purple, or green child equally the same, we knew that there were valid questions to be addressed. Did they feel discrimination as a family? Did their children feel accepted? I was surprised to hear that they have all had good experiences and they all said that they feel that this is actually a great place for a blended family because Utah is so family oriented and adoption is very proactive here. Since then, it is hard not to go to a festival – or even the mall – and not see a blended family! Since it is so difficult to adopt from China now and many Asian countries have closed their adoptions, it is predicted that African adoptions will soon be the norm.
Unfortunately, Haiti continued to remain closed, so we (sadly) dismissed that idea. We were actually looking closely at Nepal or adopting correctable special needs from India or China, but Nepal was (is) having major changes in their ministry which means many road blocks with adoptions, and a special needs adoption from India/ China was not feeling right for us, either. Africa still had never crossed my (our) mind, but within a few weeks, 3 different people planted the seed by mentioning adopting from there. Our dear fiends also went there for a job assignment for the U.N. during this time - resulting in The Kid's peeked interested in Africa (meaning we were talking about it a lot!). One day I stayed home from work when The Kid was ill and I stuck him in front of multiple movies so I could again commit to hours of research. In all seriousness (really!), he came up to me mid morning and said, “I want a sister this color” and handed me a brown People Colors Crayola Crayon. It was probably because he was just watching a show portraying African American children and I had told him earlier that I was researching adoption, but none-the-less, I decided that this might be a sign so I pulled up Ethiopia adoption.
No kidding – after about 15 minutes of researching – I was almost practically sold. After ½ the day, I was already falling in love with the people and the country. Even though I found Taiwan interesting, I never felt as moved by the country and the plight of its children as I already felt in that first day of researching Ethiopia (ET). I was practically shaking when my dear Husband came home and I thought he might fall over when I announced that I think we should seriously consider ET. We then talked about it, read up, and finally taped a list with the pros/cons of our few top contender countries to the fridge. We decided to reflect upon it personally for 2 days. When we talked again, I knew ET was my #1, so when Husband announced first that ET was also his choice, it was a done deal! After another month of mind-boggling agency research, we picked our agency (World Association for Parents and Children) and the madness began!
What about HIV? Aren’t you scared of adopting a sick child?
Sure, it is scary! But we feel confident in the fact that they are administered the best HIV screenings and it has not been officially documented that a child has been adopted out of ET with a false negative screening. There are always other communicable diseases and malnutrition to worry about, but Husband and I have discussed all the possible outcomes and feel that nothing can come our way that we don’t feel we can’t handle. If I could still get pregnant, we almost feel there would be equally as many “what-ifs” with a pregnancy at my age. We have a small advantage in that we are adopting an infant, so the chances of them contracting a communicable disease (or even suffer from Reactive Attachment Disorder) or having more major, long term effects from malnutrition, is more minimal than if we were to adopt an older child. When we get our referral, we will get all medical information on that child (including blood work, developmental reviews, etc) and have an international medical specialist lined up from our local Children’s Hospital to review her file with us before we accept her referral.
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