Why We Are Raising Funds For Our Adoption

I have been asked numerous questions lately which have burdened me.  My heart is telling me to address them here so here goes.

"Why are two mature adults who appear financially stable asking others to donate $1 to help them? " Let me explain.  The cost of international adoption is around $30,000.  Even though it is a large amount this is the less than the price of vehicles that many people drive.   Human life vs. car puts it in perspective for me. I know those who have not adopted are not educated on the costs so I wanted to share so that others might understand a little better.

This is the breakdown of costs:
1. In the beginning you must choose an agency and pay an agency fee to secure their services -
$325. Then you must begin to gather paperwork to see if you qualify to adopt from the country that you wish to adopt from.  This involves having medicals for everyone in your family.  For us this was a $35 co-pay x 4. 
2.  Each adult in the home must be fingerprinted - $49 x 2
3.  If you have ever had counseling of any kind China requires a psychological evaluation - $500.
4.  China requires that you have education prior to a homestudy to insure that you are prepared to proceed - online course $300
5.  You must obtain birth certificates for each parent, marriage certificate and divorce records.  They must be certified and they were $30 for each so for us $180.
6..  Homestudy Fee - $2000 - A social worker must visit with your family four times in order to complete a home study.
7.  Once you have a completed home study you then must apply to USCIS, the United States immigration department, for approval to adopt a child internationally.  The cost is $720 plus an $85 fingerprinting fee for each parent.
8.  When approval is received from USCIS then you are at a point that all of your dossier forms must be authenticated.   Each form had to be notarized.  The forms must be authenticated on a county and state level.  Basically this means that the Jefferson County courthouse had to verify that each person who notarized our forms was indeed a licensed notary.  We had around twelve documents at $5 a document.  I then drove the forms to the Secretary of State in Montgomery.  They had to authenticate that the person in Jefferson County was "approved" to do the authenticatication on county level.  Their cost escapes me now but I believe it was also $5 a document.
9.  Once forms were authenticated on a county and state level a courier has to be utilized to hand deliver the documents to the Chinese Consulte in Houston, Texas.  This cost was $150 for the courier fee plus $25 for each document.  As mentioned we had twelve documents.  Postage is always incurred as documents must be sent FedEx and usually overnighted.  The Chinese Consulate must authenticate that each document is an original and that the county and state authentications are in order.
10.  There are adoption agency fees -  A portion of these fees also go to the Chinese government to facilitate the adoption - around $8750.  In addition Chinese requires that the child be followed for five years so there are postplacement visits. The upfront cost to pay is $660 for these plus additional fees as the visits are made.
11.  If your passports are not current they must be renewed which was the case for us - that cost was $140 each.
12.  When it is time to travel you must apply to the Chinese Consulate for a visa to enter their country - this cost is $140 a person so for our family $560 if we are all able to travel.  You must also pay a courier fee to process them for you so around $150 plus shipping both ways.
13.  In country costs for food/lodging/transportation is estimated to at least be $2500.  You are there for twelve days. (Our current plans are to stay at the least expensive hotel which is around $80 a night).
14. Flights to China are averaging $1500 at this point.  We plan to drive to Atlanta and fly from there to save on costs.
15.  Once in China you must pay legal fees and an orphanage "donation" this totals - $7100. 
16.  You child must obtain a Chinese passport so that she can travel to the US.  She must also obtain a visa from the US government to allow her to enter the country - this will total around $355. 
17.  Our government requires that a child be vaccinated prior to entering the US.  We are planning to try and avoid this if any way possible but if required that cost is around $300. 

This is our third adoption.  We fully paid for the adoption of our other two daughters and we never in a million years thought we would be in the situation we are now finding ourselves in with our need to raise funds to complete this adoption. We started the adoption process in June, 2011.  We took a giant leap of faith as we did not know how we would fund the costs. God miraculously provided almost all of the funding in a way that we never ever imagined.  (I will share that in another post). As posted before we had to change agencies due to a family member's disapproval of us adopting and causing major interference with our agency. When we changed agencies we lost around $5000.  Every single piece of paperwork with exception of the psych eval had to be redone.  Paperwork can be no more than six months old when it is submitted to the Chinese Consulate.  We had to have an additional home study.  At the point of our paperwork being almost fully completed and ready to submit to China we learned that our placing agency was suspended from the Chinese adoption program.  They stated that they could not submit our dossier to China until 9.10.12.  We had to change agencies again.  We lost $3850 to them but thanks be to God they have agreed to refund $3000 in three payments.  We received the first payment last week. 

This may be too much information to share but for some reason I feel as if I have to defend our family.  My husband grew up extremely impoverished with a single welfare mother.  His mother was raised in foster care and had no job skills.  His father left the family when he was four and his mother never remarried.  My husband has no college education and earns $65000 a year.  He has worked for the same company since he was 18 years old.  He is now 54 years old.  He is the most hard-working person that I have ever seen in my life.  There is nothing that he will not do within his full time position or picking up extra work in many forms to provide for us.  He has great pride and strongly fulfills his role of provider of his family.  My children and I will never lack any basic necessity as long as he has breath in him.  I worked full time until 2006.  I made the decision to stay home to care for our children.  I was a social worker at a Children's Hospital which was a demanding position with on-call duties.  Our income dropped drastically.  We have been married for 12 years.  In that time we have completed raising our three older children.  My husband fully paid for his daughter's college education.  We paid for one and one-half years of my daughter's education and would have paid the remainder but she chose to change colleges and move five hours from home.  We bought each of the three older children a car.  We adopted two children from China.  We paid for our daughters' weddings. All without incurring debt.  We live extremely frugally.  We live in an older primarily blue collar neighborhood.  Our house was built in 1964.  We homeschool our children.  We live a very simple life. We thrift store shop for our children's clothing.  We desire to be comfortable but material possessions are not our priority. The love of God, following His Will for our lives and our children are our priority.  

We can fully absorb the care of caring for our new daughter on a daily basis. We have excellent medical insurance.  Not everyone has $30,000 lying around to adopt.  Another way I put it in perspective is "how many who are pregnant and giving birth would have the cash lying around to fully pay for their entire prenatal care costs, hospital delivery, plus nursery care?"  Does that mean those people should never get pregnant and have a child?  God led us to China twice before and He has led us there again.   We have a strong faith and know that he will provide.  If you have read this far God bless you.  This post has been cathartic for me and my mind is free from all the thoughts swirling around.  I am sorry we are asking others to help us.  I can assure you we will pay forward once we are home.  In closing this very long post I want to thoroughly thank those who have reached out to help us! We are so extremely grateful and humbled. This is NOT a comfortable position at all but God has taught us so  much through this process.  We have learned to look to HIM for all of our needs.  Our faith in God is stronger.  May God bless you immensely.