Why Uganda?

One of the most frequent questions I am asked is "Why Uganda?" With 163,000,000 orphans all over the world, what made us choose to adopt a little boy out of Uganda? (And yes, for those of you who noticed, there use to be 147 million orphans. It has increased to 163 million.) Let's just say that it has been a journey. We started out just saying yes to God about adopting but had no idea what that would look like. Thankfully, God has been faithful to lead us.

We decided to pursue local adoption first and see what God would do. We started to take the certification classes needed to foster or adopt locally, and were 30 hours into our 36 hour program when God made it clear that this is not where he wants us to adopt (at least not right now). God had been stirring in my heart a burden for the international orphan that had been growing stronger with each week, so when He closed the door on a local adoption for us, it made sense to me.

Ok, so local evidently wasn't what God had in mind, but now we still needed to decide between the whole rest of the world! Through much prayer, and after looking at adoption statistics (how many orphans are adopted out of what countries) we decided to adopt from Africa.

A sweet friend of mine has a blog and in one of her posts she inadvertently introduced me to the website 147millionorphans.com. Through this website, the two mom's who started this organization, and being introduced to a girl named Katie Davis, I quickly learned a lot about the adoption need in Uganda. My heart was quickly drawn in and I felt like the Lord was giving me a burden for this country.

Also, looking at statistics like these were hard to ignore...

* Over 50% of the population are under the age of 15. This makes Uganda a nation of children.

* Nearly 11 million die each year before their 15th birthday.

* Over 20,000 children have been abducted and forced to serve as child soldiers.

* Over 2 million known orphans. The largest population of orphans per capita.

I started sharing what I was learning with Jake and we spent a week fasting and praying about our decision to adopt and in the end felt like it was clear that we should adopt from Uganda.

We got matched up with our amazing agency Generations Adoptions and in the beginning of June we sent in our application.

It is now the beginning of October. So far, we have had interviews with Generations, we have gathered many documents, filled out a ton of paper work and written autobiographies. This makes up what is called our Home Study. We mailed our Home Study off to the United States Citizen and Immigration Services office (or USCIS). We are just waiting now for them to approve it and give us the next step of the process.

We are projected to be matched with a little boy by Christmas and travel to pick him up late Spring/Summer. We can not wait!!!

Ok, I think you are mostly caught up on where we are now! Hopefully this will make it easier to follow what God is doing with us from this point on.