Uzburburfenzleschnuckerstan?!?!?

Thank you to my little brother for contributing the title to this edition. Uzbekistan was not an obvious choice to us initially, nor did I even know the country existed until several months ago.

Our first searches for countries and agencies was through the information that our friends (Tom and Tanya) provided us. We zero'd in on Ukraine. They are one of the only countries that you travel "blind" to (without a referral for a particular child) and then are presented childrens' files to choose from once you are there. You can actually meet the child and then decide if they are a good fit for your family. The country of Ukraine has been through a lot of turmoil and change in their international adoption program. They had shutdown for several months and had recently reopened. I felt drawn to Ukraine for several reasons. I liked the idea of actually getting to meet the child first (I think I also had some strange fantasy where we'd go to the orphanage and actually fall in love with two little girls and just HAVE to bring them both home.) Ukraine also prefers PAP's (potential adoptive parents) who adopt independently without the use of an agency. That appealed to the "do it mine ownself" (quote from a toddler Lisa many years ago) part of me. Thirdly, most of the children in Ukraine would visually blend with our family in a way that people would not be asking "oh, is she yours?". As I mentioned before, we are a military family. We don't live close to our extended family and a lot of the connection that is built with grandparents, uncles and aunts is through photographs/videos. While I am confident that Mike and I could gladly accept a child of any color into our family (even heliotrope!) and bond 100%, I'm not sure that it would be quite as easy for the extended family. I want to give our future daughter every benefit of family, including that of extended family.

So, I read everything I could find on Ukraine and adoptions from there. I read countless blogs of families preparing paperwork, families returned, etc., etc. But, for as much research as we had done, we just couldn't commit to it. It seemed like a "good idea", but we just could not bring ourselves to take the next step. One evening I stumbled across the About a Child website after their director and facilitator were mentioned on one of the Ukrainian adoption yahoo group posts. They had a little "ad" on the side of the screen mentioning their Hungarian program. That drew me in enough (Mike's roommate in college was Hungarian) to check out their country comparison chart. At the bottom was a country I'd never heard of... Uzbekistan.

Uzbekistan is fairly new to international adoption and can have a lot of uncertainty. On the flip side, it offers us a chance to adopt a little girl as young as four months old. Since we have three sons already to keep us busy, we have the luxury of time and patience. Other families without children might be turned off by the uncertainty of timely referrals and adoption processing. We have three not-so-little distractions to take our minds off of the process occurring on the other side of the world. I could not imagine dealing with such uncertainty if we didn't already have an established family in place. You can read more about the Uzbekistan process at our agency's website at: http://www.aboutachild.org/Uzbekistan.php