Why Honduras???

I guess the main answer would be, Why not?   BUT…if you would like more insight into our decision making, continue to read…. :-)

Adoption is something that both Kyle and I have felt called to for a long time, honestly, even before we met each other. We weren’t exactly sure when it would happen in our family building time-line, but the Lord has made it clear to us that He would like for it to be now.

When we started to seriously consider what adoption would look like for our family, we started looking at resources to figure out how to go about this process. What an overwhelming array of information that exists out there! We briefly considered domestic infant adoption and also the foster-adopt public program. Though both of these options may be something we pursue for future children, there was just something in our heart that was telling us to look to another country for our first child.

The next decision was what country we wanted to adopt from and which agency we would use to facilitate the process.  To narrow the country prospects, we could take every country off the list that we didn’t meet demographic/personal qualifications for. For instance, we would love to adopt from Haiti, but one person in the marriage has to be at least 35 (the other can be no less than 27 years old), and you have to be married for at least 10 years with no children (apparently you can get them to bend on the no children aspect, but not on the other two) – so obviously we can’t adopt from there yet. We also wanted to adopt from a country that we felt a calling towards and an affinity for the people and culture – we will want our child to know where they have come from and to live some aspects of the culture in our home.  We researched some agencies and from there we prayed about which country He wanted us to adopt from.

For those of you who know us well, it’s not surprise that we have a love for Latin America – the people, the culture, and the countries. I have been to Honduras three times now and love it more every time I go. We have both talked about wanting a child from a Latin American country, but many of them have closed their borders to international adoption or have very difficult travel requirements; as a result, we weren’t sure if we’d ever be able to bring home a little Latino child to our home.

We looked into American World Adoption Association based on a recommendation from a family in our church. To our joy and surprise they had a pilot program for Honduras!  A pilot program means that it is a program that is still in its beginning stages, but they do have families that are on the waiting-for-their-child list in Honduras and others that are in the process of getting their paperwork submitted to get put on the waiting list. As exciting as it was to find a program to adopt from a country that we have a connection to, it was equally as scary because of the newness of the program. There are a lot of unknowns as far as time frames, stability of the program, etc, but after a lot of prayer we decided it was a risk we were willing to take. While we were still in the decision process, Kyle pointed out to me that adopting from a country that has a new program and that has some extensive travel requirements (two trips – the first that is about 7 days and the second that is 4-6 weeks for at least one parent) is going to require a lot of relying on God. Not that any of this is really in our control, but if we adopted from a country that was more “predictable” in the process and timeframe, we might be able to do it on our own strength rather than rely on God’s strength for the process. After he shared that perspective with me, I felt even more confident that our child was waiting for us in Honduras.

We are not the first parents to pioneer in this program, but we are involved in the baby stages of it. We are optimistic that as the program continues it may become more efficient and well-established which will be better for the children waiting to be adopted and the parents waiting for them as well. We are certainly in this for the long-haul, but on the up-side was have several years to prepare and get excited for our child to come home to us!