if there are millions of orphans, why is it taking so long to get our daughter?

  • Posted by erin

making a quilt together, for lainey

Like a pregnancy, or a deployment, what seems like NO time to others can often drag on for me. I remember when Chris was deployed, someone asked me for how long, I said six months and the lady turned to me and said “Oh, that’s not bad.” Hmmm, have you done six months without your husband, several days without talking to him on the phone when you know he went into an area that isn’t safe? Or when he returned, “It seems like he just left.” Certainly to others it may seem this way, but not to me.

This is the feeling I have with our daughter. It may seem like we just started this process, like we haven’t been waiting for our referral for long. To me the wait since we submitted our dossier in January seems to be taking for.ev.er. Looking back, I entered into this adoption very naive. I had read the statistics and my heart broke. No child should be without a loving family, and I still believe that, so much pretty certain we will adopt again.

The statistics say there are millions of orphans. Yes, yes. There are millions of orphans all over the world. But I’m learning that not all orphans are adoptable orphans. Not all orphans, as we know are babies. And not all babies, survive in the Congo. In the past couple days, Chris has been calling around. Trying to find answers. With his pending deployment upon us, the uncertainty of everything we wanted some answers.

Things we’ve found out:
- Because girls are considered worthless in the Congo, they are more likely to be tossed in a river or killed right after the mother has them, whereas boys are considered more valuable as they can work, so they are more likely to survive in the beginning.
- There are many children who may be entered into the statistics as orphans, but they are I guess wards of the state as their parents can’t afford them. They stay in an orphanage type place until the parents can afford to support them again. So statistically they are considered orphans, but they aren’t adoptable. I kinda correlate it with our foster care system.
- There are orphanages that do not allow for international adoption.
- What happens many times, is a mother has her baby, wants to keep him/her and then because of the violence to women over there by the time the baby is one or so, the mother has been raped and is pregnant again. She can’t care for the first and things seem hopeless, so she gives her child up. This will put the child into an orphanage around 1.5 or 2.

Chris and I requested a baby girl. Now that I’ve learned more facts, I have questioned if we should have requested a 1-3 year old girl (who will most likely be raped if she isn’t adopted).

I’m a big believer that everything happens for a reason and even with the long wait, I’m seeing some of the good in waiting.
- I’m meeting other people through facebook/blogs that are adoptive families. I hadn’t searched this out until recently and they have all kinds of advice, stories, etc that I can really connect with and learn from. I just listed a few on my adoption page. I’ll be listing more soon.
- Our baby Lainey will not have to endure a deployment for a while.
- Chris goes to shore duty next summer. That is 4 to 5 years (!!) that he most likely won’t deploy.

One of the hardest things about waiting is answering sweet little Cami’s questions of “when is my baby sister coming?” “is she born yet?”. She still doesn’t know about her dad deploying (sigh)… So the other day, she came to me with a pattern. “Can I make a quilt? I made this pattern for my little Lainey Love.” The eagerness of her voice, just melted my heart as she explained the little checkered squares. So that’s what we are sewing together in above picture. A little quilt for our little Lainey. With a nesting mama and sister, she’s going to have quite the collection when she arrives! :)

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