Why Bulgaria?

   
    I have been wanting to write this blog for a while, but haven't been sure what to say. God has been showing and telling me little by little and now I think that I can answer the question, "Why Bulgaria?". We get this question a lot. Some people are just curious and some are really asking, "Why not America?". Let me start off by saying that when we started the adoption process, we weren't limiting ourselves to any specific country. And if I am being honest, I thought we would adopt domestically. So we are in no way opposed to adopting children in America! God has given us both an overwhelming burden for orphans. It doesn't matter what country they come from or what race they are. An orphan is an orphan! They all need a family and they all need to be shown the love of God. The idea, that as Americans we should adopt from America only (or first), is absolutely an American mindset not a Christian mindset. We aren't told to only minister to and help our fellow countrymen. In fact, we are told the exact opposite: "Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation." (Mark 16:15) This command wasn't just for missionaries. We are to love take care of people from every nation. I was reminded of this while reading my devotions this morning. It was the story of the Good Samaritan. (If you don't know it, please read Luke 10:30-37) When Jesus finished telling the story, He asked who had proved themselves to be a neighbor to the wounded man. The answer was, "The one who showed mercy toward him". That speaks volumes to me! "And Jesus said to him, 'Go and do the same'." (Luke 10:37b) We hope one day that God will give us the opportunity to adopt domestically, but we will wait on God's leading. Anyone who is offended or doesn't get it or thinks that we should be adopting domestically, I just ask that you search your heart. It may be that God has placed American orphans on your heart for a reason.
   
    So then... Why Bulgaria?
   
    We started praying for God to prepare us for adoption about 5 years ago. this was before we were even married, but we both already knew that we had a burden for adoption. We did try to get pregnant for almost 3 years, but I hesitate to even tell people that anymore. We are not adopting because we can't have "our own" children! We fully planned to adopt regardless. God has used infertility to get our attention and tell us, "Now, I want you to adopt now, don't wait." So we started looking into it. We got information on adoption agencies and prayed that God would direct us to the right agency. He clearly lead us straight to "All God's Children International". Through them, God directed us to Bulgaria. Do I understand "Why Bulgaria"? Honestly, no. But this morning our pastor preached on two very well-known verses that explained it to me:

Trust in the LORD with all your heart,

And lean not on your own understanding;

In all your ways acknowledge Him,

And He shall direct your paths."

(Proverbs 3:5-6)

   

    I don't understand, and I don't need to. But I do know that God has directed us to Bulgaria, and we absolutely believe that is where "our own" children are. 

Where to start...

So much has happened since the last post that I am finding it hard to know where to start! Let's see... well, Justin's work was very slow, they were telling him to not even come in a couple days out of the week. If you don't work, you don't get paid. With agency and translation fees staring us in the face, we were getting very worried. But once we turned to God and let Him handle it, He did. Justin got the opportunity to work in SC with guaranteed, out-of-town pay. While we didn't get to see much of each other for a couple months, we got caught up on a lot of things and were able to put aside the money for the fees and get the translation started. I also got the opportunity to work full-time and overtime during that same time. This was a lot of hard work for both of us, but it was definitely God's answer to our prayers. 

Since then, we have gotten our translation finished and are officially registered with the Bulgarian Ministry of Justice. They are the ones who will look at our file and match us with available children. This is called our "referral". The referral consists of all of the information that they have for the children, including: medicals, photos, history, etc. We could receive our referral at any time, however this could take up to 24 months. Once we get our referral, we have 10 business days to decide if these are the children that God has for us. Once we accept, we will be flying within 1-2 weeks to go meet them.

We had applied for grants from HelpUsAdopt.org, LifeSong and Show Hope. We were declined any help from HelpUsAdopt.org, this is not a Christian organization and it was a last minute application that we sent. We were not expecting anything from them, but we were hopeful. It was still a disappointment. We had gotten a call from Lifesong, they were just verifying our information, and we should hear a final decision in 2-3 weeks. After 5 weeks went by with no word, we assumed it was bad news and I had to call! I was told that they had run out of funds for grants, however our application was sitting on the director's desk and they were reaching out to other sources to fund us. We asked everyone to pray, and we were on pins and needles until we finally heard back from them. A church in VA had decided to fund a matching grant for us!! It is a $2,500 matching grant! Praise the Lord! They also approved us for the "Both Hands" project which I went into more detail about in a previous blog. Basically, we will get a team together to help us work on a widow's home, doing anything from cleaning, painting, fixing things, yard work... whatever they need done that we can feasibly do in one day. All of our team members will send out letters to their family and friends asking to be sponsored while they work on the home. (Much like being sponsored for a 10K). 100% of the donations will be tax-deductible and go directly towards our adoption expenses, and the first $2,500 will be matched dollar-for-dollar. We will be helping a widow with one hand and an orphan with the other, and using "Both Hands" to carry out James 1:27. We are extremely excited about this fundraiser, we also hope that it can help us to be fully funded for the adoption, which will allow us to accept a referral sooner. We also heard back from Show Hope and they approved us for a $4,000 grant! The Lord is certainly showing Himself faithful, and we want to thank everyone for their prayers!!

This may sound like a lot of money, so let me break it down a little bit. Once we accept a referral and until we bring our children home, we will have to pay two international fees and another translation fee, totaling about $11,500. Then we will have to travel to Bulgaria twice, which will be about another $8,000, not including the in-country costs like lodging and food. Then if we do get a referral with more than 1 child, we will have to pay additional fees. So far, we have only been paying fees based on adopting 1 child, so we will have to pay approximately $9,000 more to cover a second child, and a few thousand more for a third child. This is not including re-adoption fees and post-adoption fees, and these are all just estimates. So, this might put into perspective why this fundraiser is so essential to finishing up our adoption.

We have so many specific things to be in prayer about: Right now, we need to find the widow that God wants us to help. We also need more people to be on our Both Hands team. Without these two things, we can't move forward with the project, so please be in prayer for this. If you would like to be involved in any way with the project, whether you want to be on our team or just help stuff and address envelopes with us, please contact us. We also welcome any questions, we know that this fundraiser is very involved and it can be hard to explain exactly how it works. 

We also would appreciate prayer for God's timing and our patience. Hearing that it can take up to 24 months to get our referral was very discouraging. But God has been faithful to us in this whole process and we need to continue to keep our faith in Him!

We are very excited to be moving along with this process and we are looking forward to finally seeing our children's faces and getting to know who they are! Please pray that God would protect them and help them to understand that we are diligently working so we can bring them home. 

Please feel free to contact us with any questions, or just a word of encouragement at JHans2678@gmail.com.

Also, check out the Both Hands project at www.BothHandsFoundation.org. And be in prayer about becoming involved with this fundraiser in some way. 

We are still selling the "Shirts of Hope", which you can purchase by clicking the link to the top-right. ----->

If you feel led to donate towards our adoption and would like for it to be tax-deductible, you can send your check to: 
Lifesong for Orphans
PO Box 40 / 202 N. Ford St.
Gridley, IL 61744
(Important: the Memo line must have "Preference Hansen #2821 adoption" for us to get credit!)


Thanks for your continued prayer and support! God Bless!

A Happy Mother's Day Indeed

We are currently working on our dossier, which is basically all of our paperwork, including the homestudy, background checks, pictures, medicals, etc, etc, in one giant packet. We have to have our dossier completed to move forward with the adoption. The last thing that we needed was our NBC approval, which is Immigration giving us permission to bring our foreign born children into the country. This takes up to 3 months to get. As part of the approval, we travelled to WV to get our fingerprints done about a week ago. This past Sunday (Mother's Day), I checked the mail because I hadn't checked it the day before. In the mail was our NBC approval!! We didn't expect to get it until mid-July. As you can imagine, this made it a wonderful Mother's day for me. We are one step closer to getting our kids!!!

Now all we have to do is get all of our notarized documents authenticated. Then send everything (our dossier) to the adoption agency to be translated and sent to Bulgaria. Once Bulgaria receives our dossier, we will be registered and officially waiting for our referral! We will have to pay an agency fee as well as a translation fee when we send in our packet, so we are scrambling to get that together. But we have had some amazing people send us unexpected donations, which we are extremely thankful for!!! (You know who you are... Thank you!!!)

We are still waiting to hear back from the grants that we have applied for, please pray that the Lord will guide these organizations to make the right choice, whether that is us or not. We are also working on a few fundraisers for the near future. Please continue to pray for our patience and that our faith and trust in Christ would grow even more. Also, keep our children in your prayers!



P.S. We are still selling our "Shirts of Hope". These shirts are an awesome way to show your support of adoption and help us bring our kids home!






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Shirts of Hope

Our "Shirts of Hope" fundraiser is up and running! 45% of the profits of all shirts sold will go towards our adoption. Please help spread the word about adoption by wearing your shirts proudly. You will also be helping to bring our children home and we will be forever grateful!

Here is the link to follow and purchse your shirts:
 www.adoptionbug.com/BurdenedForAdoption

Here are your shirt options chosen by us (The Bulgarian one is my favorite!):

Homestudy...Check

It has been a while since my last blog. I have felt like nothing is happening, we were still working on the same thing and not getting anywhere... until now!

We started working on our homestudy 4 months ago. We had our interviews back in January. Since then, we have been gathering tons of paperwork, and doing loads of adoption education. Finally on Tuesday, April 3 our homestudy was approved and finalized!!! This is a huge accomplishment. We are getting so close. The next process is the NBC approval and finishing the dossier. The NBC approval is basically the government giving us permission to bring our foreign child/ren into the country. This can take up to 3 months. We are also starting to get our paperwork translated so it can go to Bulgaria. This can take from 4-6 weeks, but it is being worked on at the same time as the NBC approval. So hopefully within the next few months our dossier (all the paperwork) will be sent to Bulgaria and they will start deciding who our children will be! Basically, after all this waiting, we are just a few months away from the "waiting stage".

In the meantime, we are applying for adoption grants. We have applied for HelpUsAdopt.org, they give grants between $500 and $15,000. We are also getting our documents together to apply for the Show Hope grant and the Lifesong grant. Lifesong will give us the opportunity to receive donations which will be tax deductible. My previous blog explains the fundraiser that we are also applying for with LifeSong, "Both Hands". We are doing a fundraiser with Show Hope and Adoption Bug starting next week, Shirts of Hope. We will have our own online store where you can purchase adoption t-shirts and 45% of the proceeds with go towards our adoption. A small portion also goes to Show Hope and helps other families adopt as well. You can wear your shirt proudly, promoting adoption and knowing that you helped bring our children home. (We will share the site address as soon as we get it.) We will be working on some other fundraisers as well. The next fees we will have to pay will be very large (about $10,000), and this is not counting our travel to Bulgaria twice. {I have posted links to all of these grants and fundraisers on the bottom of the blog.} 

One of the most amazing things that we have been blessed with was meeting a family who is also adopting from Bulgaria. A few weeks ago, we had the privilege of meeting a family that lives just 5 minutes away. Amazingly enough, they have been working with the same adoption agency and adopting from the same country for the last 4 years. they are a lot further along in the process than we are, in fact they have already travelled to Bulgaria once and met their son. It was such a blessing to meet them, they can answer every question we have about the entire process and even the country where our children are. God works in wonderful ways! When we moved here in January 2011, we didn't have any plans to start the adoption process, but God knew that we would and He knew that we would need help and encouragement. I have no doubt that He put us this close for a reason. How cool will it be, when we finally get our kids home, that they will have a friend just down the road who shares the same home country with them? We have also been in contact with a family about 40 minutes away that are also adopting from Bulgaria. There are about 5-6 families in our area who have finished the process or are still in the process of adopting from Bulgaria. We will be able to have wonderful get-togethers, where our children can interact with other children all from Bulgaria... it's just too amazing for words!

Thank you for all of your support and encouragement! We love encouragement, we can't get enough of it. Please don't hesitate to send us a quick note letting us know that you are thinking about us and/or praying for us. We would also be happy to answer any questions that you might have. Please continue to pray for us! Please pray that the NBC approval will be a quick process. And pray that we can raise and save all the funds that are quickly coming due, pray for the grants as well. Of course, continue to pray that God will grant us the patience to continue in this long process. We have both gained so much trust and faith in God, but pray that we will continue to strengthen our faith and our relationships with our Saviour.


Links to all of the grants and fundraisers:
http://www.showhope.org/AdoptionAid/AdoptionGrants.aspx
http://lifesongfororphans.org/adGrantLoans.html
http://www.adoptionbug.com/shirtsofhope/?ref=SoH

Better-late-than-never Update

Okay... so I haven't been so good about blogging. I meant to write a blog at least every 2 weeks to keep everyone updated, but we have been so busy with paperwork and that is not much fun to write about. We have been working on our home study. The home study, like I mentioned, consists of a lot of paperwork. It is also about our background information. We have to get clearances from every state that we have lived in since we were 18. We also had to do three interviews with our social worker. For the first, she came to our house for a walk-through to be sure that it is a safe environment to bring children into. Then she interviewed us together. We basically went over what we expect, what we should expect, and how we plan to parent. The second and third interviews were individual, we drove 3 hours to meet with her and then had to answer tons of questions about ourselves (a timeline of everything we have done since we graduated high school), how we met, and what we love about each other. We really thought that the home study would be scary, that they would ask us hard questions that we don't know the answers to. But it was all just about getting to know us, who we are and where we came from. Our social worker will be writing a report that will go to Bulgaria, they will then choose which child/ren is best for us based on this report. So, it is important that this report truly reflects who we are.

Where we are now:
With the interviews over, we are pretty much just waiting. We have some online learning that we have to do in the meantime. It will take 3-4 weeks for them to get all of our clearances back and finish the report. Once it is written, we get to read the first draft. That way, we can make sure that all of the information is correct and we are comfortable with everything written in it. Once that is finalized, things should really start moving.  We will be able to start applying for grants and fundraisers at that point. Then we will be finishing up our  "dossier", this seems to be a fancy word for "more paperwork". It is just a lot of forms and notarizing and verifying.  We have to be finished with that by the end of May, which will then bring us to the referral process. This is a long, intense waiting game. We will basically be waiting for them to send us information about and pictures of our children. I can not wait for this, it is what we have been waiting years for, to finally see our child/ren's face(s). :)

Finances:
We have a few agency fees that will be due  when we finish our dossier (by May), which will total $6,000. Then once we get our referral, we will need to pay international fees which will be about $10,000. That's the big one! Of course, if we do get siblings, we will have extra fees due, since we have been paying fees based on only one child so far.  We have plans for several more fundraisers and are still saving, saving, saving!

There is one fundraiser that we are really excited about. It is called Both Hands and it is basically embracing the command found in James 1:27 "Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world." The point of the fundraiser is to help out a widow. We would get 10-20 people to volunteer to help us. Every volunteer (including us) would send out letters to family and friends to sponsor them (just like you would for a 5K or something similar). We would all spend an entire Saturday helping out at the widow's home, doing anything and everything that she needed done: landscaping, cleaning, fixing things, etc. Then 100% of the funds raised  (which will be tax deductible) would go directly towards our adoption. We would be helping a widow with one hand and an orphan with the other, and fulfilling God's command with "Both Hands". We still have to be approved to do this fundraiser, we would love to do this, so please pray that it works out. Also, if you are interested in helping us out, please let us know. Obviously, we don't have any dates yet, but we expect that it would be sometime in May. We would love to have all of the volunteers lined up and we can keep you posted. Here is the link to the website if you would like more information: http://www.lifesongfororphans.org/bothHands.html
There are also other grants that we plan to apply for, but there are no guarantees that we will be approved.

Please continue to pray for us as we go through this process. It seems that patience is going to be badly needed during these next several months. Also, please pray that the finances would come in. We know that God will provide, we just don't know which avenue He will use.  We have leaned SO much so far and wouldn't trade the experience of going through this process for anything. It is a true eye-opener to God's provision, grace, mercy and love (amoung many many other things). And has taught us so much about faith and trust in our wonderful Saviour!