Why Ukraine

I'm not going to copy everything from a prior blog but here are a couple of sections that might fill in some gaps.

The Journey So Far

I really should have started this blog at the beginning but thought at the time that the interesting part would be our actual travel time. As many of you know the paper chase part of adoption and the wait time probably have more twists and turns than the travel time. At least that is what we hope.


We have been married for nearly ten years and were pregnant for a few short weeks three years ago before losing a baby. Teresa's doctor was extra rude and said we were getting too old for that.


In March of 2006 we decided to try adoption. Both of us love kids and have been involved with children's activities at church for years. We were listening to our local christian radio station and there was a group putting on an adoption seminar at one of the churches in the Denver area.


We liked much of what we heard at the seminar. The organization was really pushing adoptions from China but also worked in a few other countries. We decided that we wanted to adopt more than one child and that we would like to adopt siblings with at least one boy and one girl. At that point it became clear that China would not be an option as nearly 98% of all children being adopted from China are girls.


Just as we felt that we had a good start on the process Ukraine decided to shut down international adoptions while they reorganized the various cabinet ministries for the new government. This was in 2006 and they remained closed for eight months. The adoption agency that was handling the international part of things called our home about six weeks after the US embassy had emailed us to let us know this was going on. I would recommend that PAP (prospective adoptive parents) sign up for the embassy's email to PAP. http://kyiv.usembassy.gov/amcit_adoptions_eng.html


Out of the countries that our original agency worked in we chose to start working toward adopting kids from Ukraine. Ukraine is a country in eastern europe that used to be part of the Soviet Union. It lies between Russia to the east and Belarus and Poland to the north and Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Moldova to the west. It also has a large southern coast on the Black Sea.


Ukraine still had communist leaders until the Orange Revolution in December of 2004. So it's journey toward democracy started much later than many other eastern European countries.


Part of the reason I liked the idea of adopting from Ukraine is that my family on both sides comes from the midwestern US, Nebraska and Illinois. Ukraine is known as the breadbasket of eastern europe and that seemed comfortably familiar.