Miracles

It sometimes seems like every door is closed right before the Grace of God blows open all of the doors at once. For us, it seemed that God had closed the doors to ever adopting, and we were wondering if we had misunderstood what God wanted us to do. We had planned to have a couple more children when Mark and I married in 1997. Little did we know that we would endure tests, fertility clinics and two miscarriages before God would open our hearts to adopting. It's funny how we watched friends from church with their children adopted from overseas, heard the testimony of a special girl who was adopted at age 8, and even had the prompting of Mark's mother in her final hospital stay urging us to "get busy." Then when USCIS rejected our paperwork as incomplete with no option for appeal, we wondered if we had been out of God's will for years. Finally, we stopped struggling to make things happen the way we thought was best. We just stopped. At the time I wondered if we were giving up, but Mark and I both knew that we wanted to be in God's will more than we wanted another child. It wasn't a hopeless time; it was peaceful. God was good, all the time, every day. The blessings He had already given us were far greater than we could have ever hoped for or imagined. And when we stopped, God started.

Anyone who has worked with the US immigration department knows how difficult it is to get any information by mail or email, and I have never heard of anyone, except us, getting a personal phone call at home from USCIS. It is especially amazing that our file had been denied a month before the call and was no longer active. When Mark told me that I needed to listen to the message on our answering machine on Thursday, March 26, I thought that it was probably a garbled message from Blaise that we would try to decipher. LOL So when I heard this, I couldn't believe it:

Hello, this message is for Mr. and Mrs. Gail and Mark Dunham. This is Officer Michelle Colvert from Immigration. I am the new orphan officer here, and I just reviewed the denial that our previous officer sent you about denying the request for change of country, and I did see in there that she did make a mistake and miss a certain element that was required in the home study. It is there, so I reversed the decision. I am approving your request for change of country. The clerks will get the new I-171h typed up and get everything cabled off to Bulgaria, and I did have a question though for you about fingerprinting for Adam. Is he no longer living in your home? I know that you had the other two children printed in December, but I don't see anything on the paper saying that Adam was fingerprinted. Our main computer system is down today, so I can't go into the computer to check. So, if you could just email us back, the email address is chiadopt@dhs.gov and just let me know whether Adam still needs to be fingerprinted or if he is no longer living at home after college is over or what the situation with Adam is. Okay, thank you very much. Bye.

Mark had heard the message several hours before and was just waiting for me to finish my school work and get home. He didn't want to call me and miss seeing my face when I heard. We jumped around and we went out to eat to celebrate. But this was only the first miracle.

We hustled to complete our physicals, get new birth certificates, and notarize all of the documents so that they could be apostilled. When we thought we finally had the last documents ready to take to Springfield and had received the I-171h from immigration, Mark had to work overtime and couldn't get the apostilles. So, I called Kay, our program coordinator, to tell her they would be delayed. She told me that TOL had a file on one sweet little peanut who had not found a family. She told us that they had just gotten a new medical report on her and that the doctor said she had a normal life expectancy, but that she just needed a family to help her develop and keep her from being sick so often. We remembered this little girl's file from before and called Kay back to say, "yes!" We wanted her to be our little girl! We both knew God had chosen her for us and the medical information didn't matter. On April 16, 2009, God opened the door and we walked through. If Mark hadn't worked overtime, we would have sent in our dossier without talking to Kay that evening. We wouldn't have known that Gracie was waiting.

It took days with the online medical dictionary to grasp the medical interventions that she had endured because interstitial, parenchymal, parenteraly, and tachi-dyspnea aren't part of our daily vocabulary. What we discovered from researching is that 750 grams is 1.6 pounds, her birth weight. This fact alone means that according to one site on prematurity, she had a 40-70% survival rate and a 50% chance of having hearing and vision problems. Her vision and hearing were tested and appear to be normal. This little girl, who was delivered in a poor, developing country, received no prenatal care and had no parents advocating for her, is a fighter. I will always be thankful to the wonderful doctors and care-givers who valued her life. Four years later, she is a tiny, active, talkative little girl who will hopefully meet her family before she turns five. She truly is our miracle child!



Here is our dossier!