India Update!

Hi guys!

Sorry it has been SO long....we have a lot to catch you up on!

Here is an update on our progress with our India adoption:

We had to have our Home Study updated to reflect our switch to India. After a couple of months working with our social worker, Michele on getting the updated papers, we were approved (again) for 2 siblings (boy or girl) ages 0-6! Side Note: This 15 page Home Study gets typed up, reviewed by several people at America World, and finally gets mailed to us.

Now that the Home Study was good to go, our next step was to get registered with CARA.

What is CARA?
CARA (The Central Adoption Resource Authority) is the government organization in India that each adopting family must be registered and approved with in order to adopt a child from the country. 

Our family coordinator, Elise registered our family along with our Home Study to CARA on May 7. It typically takes CARA 8 weeks to approve a home study.

Exciting news is that once we are approved with CARA (hopefully by the end of June), then we are eligible to begin looking at and accepting referrals of children!!!!! Our family coordinator told us that as soon as we are approved with CARA, she will check each morning for a child or children that match our "requests." The way that she explained it to us was that CARA has a giant database that adoption agencies can access. The orphaned children have profiles on the database and agencies can search for children that match their waiting families requests (based on age, gender, special needs, etc).

Another piece of the puzzle that we have been working on is getting our I-800A application submitted to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). This application is a very important document that will allow us to bring international children into this country. This application process can take up to 2 months. Once we receive this, our dossier for India will be complete and ready to send.

As we wait we would especially LOVE your prayers....

• Prayers for us to be approved with CARA (quickly)
• Prayers that the child/children that God wants us to have will show up at just the right time on the CARA database.
• Prayers that when we do receive a referral, that we will be content and at peace with the decision and not have a lot of confusion about "is this our child." We desperately want God to make it known to us when we see a child's face whether or not they are supposed to be a part of our family. 
• Prayers that our USCIS app will come back quickly 
• Prayers for fundraising projects, grants, and financial support
• And most importantly that we are following God's will and doing what He wants us to do in all that we do. 

This crazy, long, stressful adoption process has actually been really fun since we started in March of last year. We can't think of anything we'd rather be doing besides what God has called us to do! We love seeing Him work in cool ways that you can only see when you are living by faith.

Whatever your life brings, I highly recommend living by faith and putting your trust in Him. As hard as it is to not be in control, it brings great rewards!

Thank you for taking the time to catch up with us!
 
To join our adoption efforts, please visit our online fundraising site here.

To check out an upcoming fundraiser event (for all ladies), click here.

Love,

Ryan & Megan