Adoption Update: Next Steps

Lots of people keep asking me if there has been any progress in our adoption or what’s new or how is it going. I so appreciate the interest and support, especially in the form of prayer. So I’ll fill you in.

Not sure where I left off but before the holidays there was a rush of families who had been matched with kids submitting their dossiers to IBESR (Haiti social services) before they closed for awhile and reorganized under new procedures. We had no referral (child match) so we knew we’d be among the first families to go through an entirely new adoption process in Haiti.

The new procedures are intended to make Haiti’s adoption regulations come into compliance with the Hague Convention for International Adoption, which is supposed to prevent child trafficking and corruption. The process is now much more like other countries’ processes where you submit a completed dossier, it is logged in and then a referral is proposed by an orphanage and approved by the government before being suggested to the family.

Since October, Haiti has been saying that only certain adoption agencies would be allowed to continue processing adoptions, so we have all waited and prayed that America World would be among them. Last week IBESR published a list of 19 approved agencies and ours was included. We all celebrated, and now our dossier should be submitted to IBESR by our coordinator next Monday, February 4th.

Please pray that can happen, that our dossier gets accepted in Haiti and given an official file number next week. 

Concurrently, the orphanage we are working with, H.I.S. Home for Children, has to submit to them all necessary paperwork on any unmatched, available children. I can’t share any details but we are hopeful that they can submit the paperwork for child that meets our request in February. Please pray for that to happen, IF it is God’s will.

It’s so hard, praying for a family who just cannot adequately care for a baby and who will love that baby enough to place her into another family forever. If I had my way there would be no little girls for us to adopt. No children would ever be orphaned. I could live with that situation if I knew it were true.

But I believe there will be a little girl in just that situation who God always intended to be loved by us. So I do pray that all the necessary paperwork gets signed and submitted as soon as humanly possible so that she doesn’t have to go any longer without knowing she is loved by a mommy and daddy who are coming to get her.

Author: Sarah

Mom of three. Triathlete. View all posts by Sarah