A Child Waits Foundation
Adoption Grants & Adoption Loans
International and Domestic Adoption
Family Stories
International Adoption 2022
In 2022 we awarded grants to help 201 children to be adopted from 25 different countries and 28 states in the USA. Some of their wonderful pictures and adoption experiences are recounted below in the family's own words.
Raya - Lesotho
We are back with our little girl and we couldn't be more happy!
The grant that you gifted us was absolutely life changing for our family and for our little girl! We have seen God present in this whole process through finances, travel, and even when it came to getting our documents on time.
A Child Waits Foundation you should be so proud! What a privilege it is to do wonderful things for orphans and that is exactly what is happening with your organization. You are moving mountains for these little ones!
Our trip was amazing, and we are so thankful that we could take all of our children with us as it was an incredible experience for them. We were able to visit the village that our little girl came from, meet people that knew her. We saw the beauty of the country she came from and we are forever grateful for this experience and adventure!!
Thank you A Child Waits Foundation for all you have done for us
Reamohetse Amari
Raya for short. We are so in love!!!
Anthony & David- Colombia
We are so excited to be home with our two boys! It was a long journey, but definitely one worth taking. Anthony and David are doing so well in school and at home. We love all of the hugs and the “I love you so much.” Anthony was able to play soccer on the middle school team, and we enjoyed watching his games! He is a really good soccer player, and even more importantly, it gave him a way to quickly make new friends! Everyone that meets them says how sweet and polite they are. My mom loves them dearly.
We feel so blessed to be Anthony and David’s mom and dad. My mother asked them if they ever thought they would be adopted before they found out that we were adopting them. They immediately said no. Last summer, in a post-adoption interview, Anthony said that staying with us had restored his hope that maybe someday someone would adopt them. He still had a hard time believing it was real until he and his brother finally arrived home with us. He said that he didn’t think anyone would want someone as old as he is. He is almost 14 years old. I am so grateful we looked into hosting and adopting older children and that we chose to adopt a sibling group so they could stay together. We are so blessed to have them as part of our family!
We are also grateful for A Child Waits, other adoption organizations and friends and family who helped make this possible financially! We couldn’t have done this without their help! God used people all along the way to help when it was needed. Then He blessed us with a grant from A Child Waits to help meet the remaining needs that we had in order to finalize the adoption! We are also thankful for all of the help we received from our adoption agency, CCAI. They were with us every step of the way, from beginning until the end!
I want to encourage anyone considering adoption to consider adopting an older child or sibling group who may otherwise have a chance of having a forever family, and instead aging out of the system alone. If you’re not sure, hosting is a great opportunity to either fall in love with a child and adopt him/her or to advocate for that child/sibling group to find a family. Don’t let finances hinder you from hosting or adopting. We didn’t think we could afford to host and adopt, but we applied and received a grant that helped with the cost of hosting our boys! Then we received several grants to help with adopting. God is able to provide when we trust Him! James 1:27 says, “Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” God may want you to adopt an orphan (or two or three!), or he may be calling you to help support someone else who is adopting, or to provide for the physical needs of children who are in orphanages, or to advocate for children who need families. Not everyone is called to adopt, but everyone is called to do something to help care for the orphans in our world.
Phoebe & Daniel - Liberia
for about 6 weeks. It's been good, harder than hard and beautiful. Our family has been on a roller coaster of emotions as we adjust and labor to love each other and develop our new normal. I have attached some photos of our family and Phoebe and Daniel. Can't thank you and A Child Waits Foundation for coming through with grant funds. Every penny was used to bring these beautiful souls home!
Our family has been home
Valery - Colombia
Back in 2020 we saw a little girl through a hosting organization, and we fell in love. Due to Covid the process to bring her home took longer than expected. In February 2021 we were able to start the adoption process to adopt this little girl from Colombia. She had been in an orphanage since she was 6 months old and we were able to adopt her when she was 8 years old. In March of 2022, we were finally able to go to Colombia and bring Valery home. We adopted her in April of 2022 and brought her home at the end of April.
We are a hardworking family without a lot of debt but also without the amount of money saved to pursue an international adoption. We began filling out grant applications and we were so thankful that we were selected for a grant from A Child Waits Foundation to help with our adoption. Our adoption ended up being almost $50,000 and without grants, we would not have been able to bring Valery home. She is an incredible little girl who just needed a family. She has been home just a short time but is already doing so well here in the United States. We have gotten her the medical care she needs and will continue to as long as she needs it. She is talking so much more and is learning new things every day. Thank you so much for helping us adopt our sweet girl. She is a miracle and we can't wait to see what the future holds for her.
Lebo - South Africa
She’s doing wonderfully! She’s such an amazing kid.
We are so appreciative of all the help A Child Waits and your donors have for our family. ♥️
May - Thailand
We both grew up in communities where adoption was beautiful, normal and good, so naturally we talked about adopting since we started dating. After lots of schooling, multiple moves, and 2 deployments, our lives were stable enough to begin the adoption process.
We believe that God created adoption, and He has adopted us into His family. Now it is our joy, privilege, and commitment to adopt our 4 year old daughter into our family.
When we started the adoption process in May 2019, no one could
anticipate the changes that would soon be coming. Despite our years of preparing financially, the pandemic added additional costs that were significant (COVID testing, special visas, quarantining
in-country, etc.). We were incredibly grateful to receive financial assistance from not only friends and family, but amazing organizations like A Child Waits Foundation. Having the financial burden lifted, allowed us to focus on bonding rather than our bills. We were able to travel to Taiwan as a family of 3 and return as a family of 4!
Now May is adjusting to her new life in the US and tells us she loves French fries and her new family.
Thank you again!
Joubensky - Haiti
We began our adoption journey in September of 2015…which seems like an eternity ago. After many ups and downs, frustrations and celebrations, we finally got to meet our long awaited son, Joubensky, at the Atlanta airport on July 1st, 2022. It was so long but so worth it. Even though there were and are transition pains and struggles it honestly feels like Jouby has just always been a part of the family.
It is truly a testament to God’s timing being perfect and we couldn’t be more thankful for the way he called us to complete our family. At the end of the day, we simply want our adoption of Joubensky to be an imperfect reflection of our adoption in Christ through the gospel. This end is what kept us in the process and kept us persevering during the times where we wondered if it was ever going to actually happen.
We couldn’t possibly express how much we appreciate the financial resources we received from A Child Waits Foundation. Honestly, without it we might not have even been able to get our son home when we did. We long for a day more and more people aren’t cost prohibited from adopting, both domestically and internationally. But until that day we want to genuinely say THANK YOU for your assistance in ours and so many others stories.
May God continue to bless you and your Foundation in helping others live out the gospel in their personal lives.
It has made the world of a difference to one little boy from Haiti, to our family and so many others, and we know that it truly pays kingdom dividends far beyond our family or your imaginations.
Claudyson - Haiti
We are Nate and Callie, parents of five wonderful kids! We started the adoption process in January of 2016 after the loss of my father, bringing us to a posture of prayer and asking God to reveal his purpose for us and to use us however He wished. It was through the grief and prayer that the Holy Spirit softened our hearts and called us to opening our home to welcoming children through adoption. Through prayer and asking for God’s leading he was so good to tenderly keep nudging us while making connections and allowing our calling to Haiti to become clear.
We dove into the paperwork trail with urgency and got everything completed on our end only to start the years of waiting. As we waited, knowing God had called us to this, we thought our process would be undoubtedly faster than those we had seen for others adopting from Haiti. Our wait found a year, then two, then three…It was in those years of waiting that God worked on our hearts and opened it in ways we never even knew possible. It was in that waiting, through praying for years for a child we had never met, that not only was God preparing us for our child from Haiti but he opened our eyes and hearts to foster care right here among us as well.
We welcomed a number of different foster children into our home as we waited, all the while God using those days, that fire in our lives, to purify us and prepare us. We were brought to our knees over and over seeing the need for families to love these children. The prayers continued and expanded for God to use us however he wanted in the world of adoption, even if that meant welcoming other children permanently in our waiting. God so lovingly continued to prepare us and mold our hearts to look more like His, He was gracious enough to overflow our three biological children’s hearts with love that they lavished on every child we welcomed into our home.
Through those prayers God unexpectedly opened the door to us welcoming our fourth child and baby of the family in February of 2020 through domestic infant adoption. Although we welcomed another child in our home forever, we still felt the door was not closed for our Haiti adoption. God continued His work in our waiting, wasting nothing. We waited for over another year when we received our Haiti referral for another son. The next year and a half we went from checkpoint to checkpoint marking off the list of necessities to bring him home. We prayed for movement, we prayed for safety for our son, for God’s provision over him, for him to feel our love and prepare him for attachment even before we were united…God is FAITHFUL! “Be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age” Matthew 28:20. God has never left us in our nearly seven years of waiting. “God works all things for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose” Romans 8:28. He has worked for our good. Even when it was hard and didn’t feel good, His ways are higher than ours. We welcomed our son home from Haiti in November 2022! God is good and He is faithful!!!
God has provided for us financially through the help of A Child Waits Foundation! It was through the financial support of A Child Waits Foundation that we have been able to welcome two children into our home. With the demands of all that is required to adopt, it was a blessing and relief to welcome the assistance that A Child Waits Foundation’s generous givers have shown. Your help is necessary to bring children home and is valued more than words can say. May God bless you for your selfless giving! Thank you!
Yonatan - Colombia
Dear A Child Waits Foundation,
I want to thank you for providing me with a grant to help me bring home my son Yonatan. I got to know my future son Yonatan last summer as a host parent for a program called Kidsave. Kidsave advocates for older child adoption around the world. I participated as a host parent in their Summer Miracles Program. I was blessed to have my beautiful ten year old future son Yonatan in my home with me for the summer.
Myself and my family knew right away we needed to bring him home permanently and adopt him. lt has been a grueling process of blood, sweat, and tears, and literally a good part of my life daily since Yonatan left at the end of the summer. With some crazy twists and turns on the way. So many people have come on board to help me bring my son home. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it. l have been spending hours learning Spanish, reading parenting books, and taking classes to prepare myself to be the best mom I can be for my little guy. He is such a resilient, compassionate, brave little man that has been through so much in his short life. It's all worth it knowing that this little man will be joining us forever and will have a future filled with safety, love, and opportunity like he deserves!
This has been a grueling process for myself (and an entire LONG lifetime in child protection for him) but I am so humbled and honored to be able to welcome this little man and his culture into my family and my heart and home forever. We had our Encuentro on April 20th. Here are some photos from it. Yonatan has been back home for about a week and is doing well. I want to thank you again for helping me bring him home.
Mirlande - Haiti
Here we are almost two months in. It has been a whirlwind. Mirlande has had about 3 weeks of school and is beginning to meet friends and figure out how this life works in America.
It is a joy to watch her grow and be a part of new situations and experiences. Over Christmas she had time with her older siblings. They made gingerbread houses, went sledding and ice skating, played cards and spent some time singing together. She has had her challenges but is handling all the changes with strength and determination - we’re certainly seeing a streak of strong will🙂.
One of our biggest challenges might be trying to balance teaching Mirlande how to play and be a child without losing her independence. We are all learning together as we build trust and the parent child relationships. Mirlande loves to sing, play soccer at recess, and to watch videos of people dancing. She is catching up on Disney princess movies and enjoys singing the main songs. Mirlande is enrolled in jazz/ballet and also tap. She has made it pretty clear that, of the three, tap is her preference. She loves to move!
Thank you, to all of you at A Child Waits, for helping to provide our sweet girl with a chance to grow into who she was created to be - and encouraging us as we help her to do so!
Anderson, Yimy & Juan Diego- Colombia
Adoption is a journey from for now to forever.
We started in different countries, United States and Colombia. We were in different situations. Now, we are a forever family.
We are Richard and Jacqueline. We have been married for almost 10 years. Through the help of A Child Waits Foundation, we recently adopted three boys, Juan (12), Yimy (10), and Anderson (8). We had discussed adoption since we first met almost 14 years ago. We both grew up around families who adopted children internationally and had each felt drawn to international adoption. Ever since dating in college, adoption has been our first choice for growing our family. Now, we are living our dream with our family from Colombia.
When we married in 2013, we knew we needed to be in a stable position to support our future children before we started the adoption process. We began sponsoring children and volunteering with Holt when we could. We supported friends through multiple foster placements and followed other friends' adoption journeys. In September 2020, we applied for adoption. We felt both peace and excited about our decision but recognized that there may be many challenges and the potential of several unknowns throughout the adoption process. We were drawn to international adoption because we believe every child deserves love. We also knew we wanted a sibling group.
Through research, we learned Colombia has a high percentage of successful sibling matches. When we were matched with 3 brothers, we were so excited. We started intensive Spanish classes and started meeting the boys weekly on video chats. The boys moved from a foster home to a group home in Bogota and we slowly began building connections electronically.
In November 2022, we traveled to Bogota, Colombia. We all officially met in person the day before Thanksgiving. We were together for our first Thanksgiving as a family and couldn't have been more grateful. We stayed in Colombia bonding as a family and attending what felt like hundreds of appointments and meetings. On December 7th, we finalized the adoption of the boys. We stayed another 10 days waiting on Visas, etc., then flew home on December 17th in time to spend our first Christmas together, at home in the United States.
It is now February2023. We have been a family for a little over three months and are so grateful for A Child Wait's grant that helped bring our family together. We are all learning about each other and growing as we will for many more years to come.
Thank you for your support and for helping us become our forever family!
Isaiah - Ghana
It's been a whirlwind since coming back last year. We just wanted to extend another thank you for everything you did for us while we were traveling back and forth in the midst of our toughest season. A Child Waits Foundation provided much needed assistance during that season. We definitely wouldn't have made it without you all.
