Adoption E-mail

Thank you to those who commented with words of encouragement on my "Golden Opportunity" post ... As I mentioned in that post, we have been contacted about the possibility of joining with two other American families here in Chile to fly a social worker down for adoption homestudies.

In researching the possibility of international adoption, one potential roadblock we are facing is having to not only fly to our child’s country to meet him/her but also having to fly our child back to the U.S. to obtain U.S. citizenship, birth certificate and passport.

For instance, in considering Ethiopia we learned that we would have to make two separate trips to Ethiopia as well as a trip to the U.S. At around $2,000 per ticket, this does not seem to be a realistic option for us.

Yesterday, I received an e-mail from our former contact at Shaohannah's Hope (the organization who had offered an adoption grant to us last year) in response to my e-mail letting her know that we were considering another adoption. She wrote to ask whether we had re-applied for another grant.

It occurred to me then that perhaps we should research agencies within the United States who are able to place U.S.-born children with adoptive American families overseas, thus requiring only a trip to and from the United States. Several agencies have told me that they do not handle this sort of adoption, but some do.

Last night, I e-mailed ten different agencies in the U.S, explaining our situation and in particular our desire to adopt a child of African American (or African) heritage – and also, asking whether they might be able to work with a family in a situation such as ours. We’ll have to see what happens!