The Process: A quick education on the process of adopting from Lesotho

Hi all,
We are still here, waiting.............. I get that you all may not understand why we have to wait. Afterall, there are millions of orphans out there. Can't they just go to the orphanage and pick one out and say "here ya go"! Ha! I wish. There is so much more to it. It is hard for us adoptors to understand, not to mention you all who have not entered into the adoption world.

For us, the process goes something like this:  I will try to make this very long process as short as possbile.
*Apply to the adoption agency on June 21, 2013(Small World Adoption agency in Tennessee) to adopt from Lesotho. They say yes. We hire another agency here in Michigan to do our home study. That process lasted from about August through November.
*Homestudy done so now we can send our home study to the US government to ask them if we can adopt. This is called filing a I800a form with the USCIS. They get our request and ask us to come for fingerprints to make sure we aren't bad people. ;)  When we get that approval we can add that piece of paper (I797 form) to our homestudy and a million other things. This stack of papers is called a dossier.
*We send our dossier to our agency in TN. and they review it. Making sure everything is there that the counrty wants to prove we are worthy of adopting from their counrty and adopting one of their precious children.
*Our agency sends that dossier to Lesotho. Lesotho translates it and logs us into the system.
***This is where details can get fuzzy. We don't know the exact procedures in Lesotho so it is hard to know what happens after our dossier gets there.
*We are then considered "on the list". This is when the TRUE waiting begins. This is when everything is out of our hands and into the hands of the Lesotho government.
*Our official wait began at the end of February when Jimbo, a representative from our agency actually hand delivered our dossier to the Lesotho government because he was there on a trip.
*We have been told by our agency that we are about 14th on the list of families waiting to adopt from Lesotho (out of about 30 or so). We aren't sure if that even means anything. We don't know if Lesotho goes in order or if they are random in the choosing a family to match with a child.

Sidebar: Lesotho is a new country to the Hague Convention ("an international agreement to establish safeguards to ensure that intercountry adoptions take place in the best interests of the child") They just became "Hague" in April 2013, only 2 months before we applied. So, this new way of doing adoptions with the USA is all new to Lesotho. They have to learn the process. As does our agency as they have yet to complete an American adoption from Lesotho. There is one in process, a family from California, and they are supposed to travel soon to go get thier little boy. YAY!!!!



THE WAIT: Here is why we have to wait.

Lesotho has match meetings to match families with children. The first meeting they held was in December 2013, 8 months after becoming Hague. They matched 1 family from the USA, it wasn't us :(. So, we know we have to wait until there is another meeting. That was supposed to be held in March, it never took place. I won't mention the reason here on the blog because I don't know if I'm allowed to. Ask, if you would like to know. So, we wait agian for another match meeting to get scheduled. They finally schedule one for June. They matched three families!!!! YAY. No one from the USA. But what a blessing that three more children will have forever families, in the Netherlands, or Sweden or Canada!
I have connected with a group of families on Facebook that are all adopting from Lesotho, what a blessing that has been. The theory between those families is that Lesotho is waiting for this first adoption from California to go all the way through to completion before they match others from the USA. We are thinking they want to make sure all goes smooth and they know what they are doing. That is just a theory but right now we are hanging on to all we can to make sense of this.
So we wait again for another meeting to be scheduled. We have been told that there will be one sometime around the beginning of september.
That is a HUGE prayer request: Pray that there will be a meeting. Pray that there are children ready to be referred. While there are over 350,000 orphans in Lesotho, that doesn't mean they are all in an orphanage, and it doesn't mean that they are all adoptable. The ones that are at the orphanage need to be researched to make sure that all options are exhausted to declare them adoptable. That is a lofty task for the social worker down there.

Because this is a new program for our agency and Lesotho, we have no frame of reference as to how Lesotho matches families. We don't know if they match only a certian amount of families, if they match all the kids submitted for adoption or just a few. There is soooooo much we don't have answers to as far as the process in Lesotho goes. We just have to wait and see. Go on faith, and trust in Gods PERFECT timing. What we DO know is that this is Gods plan for our family. We DO know that this WILL happen, at some point.

So, there you have it. In a nutshell, some of the reasons as to why we have to wait. 
Again, Please pray with us that there will be a meeting held in September. We most likely will not be matched at that meeting but our hope is that there are families from the USA that are matched so we can move up the list (if that is how they do it down there). I will keep you posted as to what I hear regarding that meeting.

Stay tuned for an update on our fundraising/donations. I want to give you all an update as to how much the Lord has blessed us through our friends and family as far as raising the funds to bring this little peanut home.

God Bless,
The Freriks