JenGwo(8th in the series)

Late one night, just a few months after the infamous, "Well, we'll just have to adopt OLDER KIDS, then!" remark, our phone rang. It was late enough that we would not have expected anyone to be calling us. I picked up the phone and a voice on the other end, said, "This is Ted S." Immediately I recognized the name and asked in disbelief, "From Taiwan?"

Indeed, it was Ted from Taiwan. I had never spoken with him before, but over the past decade we had exchanged two or three letters. Ten years earlier, Grant and I had been traveling out of town when we had run into a young couple from Pittsburg, Kansas. They had a two year old son...a little Chinese boy...we had just begun the preliminary steps of contacting Holt International regarding adopting from China. We learned that the couple had adopted this little boy through a missionary couple who ran a small children's home in Taiwan. At the time, we were still in shock over how expensive the adoption from China was going to be. We had spent all our savings on infertility procedures and were wondering how we would ever get together the required amount to adopt from China. This couple told us how the missionary couple did all the adoption work without charging any fees. They relied on donations from churches and individuals to cover their costs. Because the couple did all the translating and all the legal work free of charge, the cost of this couple's adoption was about 1/8 what we were expecting to have to come up with in order to adopt from China. We asked for the name and address of the missionaries they had adopted through. Within days, I had written them a letter of inquiry. They had sent back an application form. I had filled out the application and Grant and I had written our testimonies and answered the other essay questions as required for the application. I sent all our information back. I received a letter explaining that they were a very small home and most of the children in the home were not available for adoption (as the parental rights had not been relinquished). Many of the children in their home were homeless due to divorce. When their mothers remarried, the new fathers frequently would not allow them into the home. This is just how it was culturally. The remarried parent, often did not want to lose their child completely, so, even though they would place the child in a children's home, they would not sign away their parental rights and would still come by several times a year to see their child. Along with the many older (often "unadoptable") children that were cared for in the home, were a few babies at a time, born to unwed mothers, who were willing to allow their babies to be adopted. Ted and Bev wrote that they had an extremely LONG waiting list of families already waiting for babies. Nothing in the letter led us to optimism. We had written back to them thanking them for their time and telling them that we had decided to go through Holt International to adopt a child from China.

We adopted Darcy through Holt. When Darcy was six years old, we were again in the process of adopting through Holt International. We had since moved to another town. Yet, one day we received an international letter that had been mailed to the address we had moved from nearly two years earlier. It was amazing that the letter had been forwarded on. I guess, because it was an international letter, the post office had forwarded it to us long after the timetable for normal forwarding had expired. The letter was from Ted and Bev. They wrote that there had been severe flooding in Taiwan that had left a number of children without parents. They assumed that we by now had a child in our home, but they wondered if we would be interested in a second child. Ironically, we had just begun a second adoption with Holt only a few months earlier. We were already in process. We wrote back to Ted and Bev explaining this. I didn't know "the rest of the story" until months after Doug had arrived home to us....

The "rest of the story" is that when Ted and Bev received that last letter from us, they had looked at each other and both agreed, "We should throw their file away." Their normal custom was to limit the families they worked with to those who were childless...they knew upon reading that letter than we not only had one child, but were in the process of bringing home a second child. They intended to throw our file out...

Fast forward almost three years. A missionary friend of theirs from another city in Taiwan called them to tell them about a little five year old boy that had been in foster care nearly all his life. He was about to be transferred to the state run orphanage. His last two foster families had been given the option of adopting him, but both had declined. His run in the foster system was about to end. I guess that the state run orphanage in Taiwan is reimbursed based on number of children in their care, so adoption out of the state run orphanage just doesn't happen. The children who enter the state run orphanage spend the rest of their childhood there. This missionary had fallen in love with little JenGwo and she didn't want this to happen to him. She wondered if Ted and Bev would have room in their children's home to take him in. Ted and Bev immediately agreed to take the little boy in with the intention of matching him with an adoptive family. Bev, immediately thought of our family, but, she decided not to say anything to her husband and just to wait and see what the Lord told her husband. Three days later, Ted mentioned to Bev, "You know, you'll probably think I'm crazy, but do you remember the C family? What do you think about us asking them if they would like to adopt JenGwo...they probably have two little girls, maybe they would like a little boy..." Bev had laughed and told him, "That is exactly who God laid on my heart!" So, it was, that late that night, out of the blue, we received a call from Ted announcing confidently, "We have a son for you." I was dumbfounded. We were finished building our family. We hadn't even had Rayna home for quite a year yet. Grant was certain we could not afford any more children. I had accepted that there would be no more children...yet, here was a voice on the other end of the phone telling me they had a son for us...not a baby, but a five year old...

(to be continued)