Here is the first of hopefully many Haitian adoption stories. It is written by my friend, Becky:

Our youngest was not quite four months old in when I first felt the inclination to assess our options regarding adoption. Megan was only our third child via birth, but my pregnancies were progressively more painful than the last due to a ge-netic anomaly with my hip. We were considering whether our family was now complete or whether we would continue welcoming children into our family via adoption.

Once I overcame the initial exhaustion of the newborn months, I knew that our family was not complete though subsequent pregnancies were not an option. I knew our other children were already born and waiting for us to find them. My husband, however, was not as keen on the idea of adding to our family. Mean-while in Haiti, our children were simultaneously finding their way to the or-phanages they would call home as we began to have these experiences the led us to adopting in Haiti.

As I researched our options, I also sought out e-mail communities devoted to adoption. One in particular stood out to me, and I became an active participant in the group. I began to have experiences where I just knew we were missing at least one child. For example, though we only had three children, I continually counted four or felt as if a fourth child was missing. I even purchased four fast food kid meals twice! I still believed our adoption experience was another year or two away, but I secretly hoped it would be happen more in the short term.

I began to gather information on specific countries and prayed to be led in the direction where our children were located. First, I thought of U.S. adoption, Eastern Europe, and China because that is where I had the most experience through friends and family. We did not qualify for China, and I eventually de-cided that our children were not in EE nor the U.S. I can not explain why, but I just felt in my heart that while I feel deeply for the children in those countries, our children were not there.

I then looked at Latin America. While doing so, I heard about Haiti, and I was drawn again and again to the photos of the beautiful children other families were in the process of adopting in Haiti. I was drawn to Haiti in a way that other countries did not grab me, but this was during the February 2004 coup so I as-sumed the strife would lead to a closure of adoptions. This assumption caused me to cross off Haiti from our list of possible countries.

Continued...