My childhood blended small family farm life with the tropical flavor of 2 years living on a small Haitian island. This produced me, a third culture kid with a dream to become a medical missionary despite the struggles of dyslexia.
Cory grew up enamored with growing things and in high school started to blend the dreams of fruit trees and missions.
Our family tree officially started in May of 1995 during the short time between my medical school graduation and starting family practice residency. Shortly into my final year we welcomed Eli, our first Thede/TerAvest hybrid.
In the fall of 1998, we uprooted and moved to LaGonave. Anna, hybrid number two, joined us in 2001. We work with Global Partners.
The Lord moved us to northern Haiti in 2007.
Since early in our marriage our hearts opened to the idea of including Haitian children in our lives and asked the Lord to open the door. In July of 2012 the Lord opened the door and let us know the time had come to start grafting our family.
After a busy time in Haiti and traveling the the USA we finally started to research Haiti adoptions in October of 2012 only to find out that independent adoptions would be no longer an option in Haiti due to changing processes.
The Haitian government made changes to their process and became Hauge compliant, April 1, 2014.
This makes us a transition family: new law but non-Hauge.
One of the first changes resulted in the creation of a list of approved agencies allowed to process Haitian adoptions. After months of delays this list was released in mid-January 2013.
During the wait we prayed, read books, talked with family, joined adoption groups on-line, researched and called adoption agencies looking for those willing to work with folks living in Haiti.
After praying and communicating with two we applied to one agency. Months later we learned that the second agency's director was under investigation for child trafficking. Thank the Lord for helping us avoid that mess.
Our home study involved flying a social worker from a separate agency into Haiti for the home visit. Unknown to us at the time they only allow adoption of sibling groups not non-related children. After the changes in Haiti's system we learned that Haiti will no longer be referring non-sibling children.
Once again the Lord saved us from potentially very hurtful complications.
Thus the launching of this our new blog specifically to chronicle our journey and share prayer requests.
Awesome! Excited to see all the who/what/where/when/hows God unveils in this journey step by step! Praying for you and love the blog title. Perfect!
ReplyDeleteExciting times ahead - thank you for sharing them with us.
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