My story
Dear Alla,
Today is July 20, 2005, our 14th wedding anniversary, and almost one year to the day that we began contemplating an international adoption. It’s really hard to believe everything that has happened during that year. We just celebrated Joshua Alexander’s 2nd birthday on July 10th. It is amazing to see him now compared to when we met him in the Kazakhstan Baby House on February 11th.
I apologize for taking so long to share our testimonial with you, but as you know through our frequent e-mail updates, it has been a very busy time since we brought Joshua home in March. We began the international adoption process after reading about the plight of orphans in the countries of the former Soviet Union. The cultural differences in the approach for caring for abandoned children was initially hard to understand, but the one thing we did understand clearly was a call to action. After considerable prayer and research we e-mailed you about a little boy in your special needs program. We were very pleasantly surprised at the rapid response and the amount of information you were able to provide. Adoption Ark is so accessible and friendly, we truly believed and understood that we were in this together as a team, and that is very important. As you know, with us both being attorneys we were full of questions and concerns, but you quickly won over our trust and we have never looked back.
Our process was different than some because the child we were hoping to adopt was picked back up from the orphanage a month before we thought we would be meeting him. Alla, you are probably most responsible for giving us the courage and resolve to travel as planned, to the region we had planned, to the orphanage we had planned. As a result, through your hard work and through prayer, we never really felt we were traveling “blind”. We knew the child God had intended for us would be waiting.
The ironic thing was we were concerned somewhat about having to select one orphan from a group of equally deserving orphans. Hearing our concerns and prayers, God made that decision easy. Little Joshua Alexander was, on the day we arrived at the Baby House, the only male orphan in our designated age bracket available for adoption. The director went on and on about everything that was wrong with him. In fact, we learned a couple working with another agency had just been shown Joshua and declined. We heard none of it, we knew in our hearts he was ours and always had been. It’s hard to explain. The best I could say to describe it is that the feeling I had when we met Joshua was the same feeling I had holding our three biological children in the delivery room.
Each day of the bonding period, Joshua revealed more and more of his personality. By day three he was quick to smile when we would arrive and readily played and “talked” to us. By the time we went to court, it was as if we had always been together. I don’t know that I have ever been more proud of Megan than I was while watching her, 7+ months pregnant, thousands of miles away from our other children, making an impassioned plea to the Kazakh judge to please allow us to adopt Joshua.
Fast-forward to now and Joshua, in many ways, is a far different child than when we met. He never wakes up without a smile! He loves to get dressed and help around the house. Our 175lb Great Dane is his favorite toy. He tries so hard to be just like his big brother and sister, and he absolutely dotes on his little sister. He was able to visit her in the hospital and we are very excited that Joshua will have the opportunity to be a big brother. He is somewhat delayed in his speech as they had said, but he is certainly not delayed in his physical growth! With as much as his older siblings talk, he could not get a word in anyway, and we are confident he will catch up fast!
All in all, our experience with Adoption Ark, and in particular with Alla has been a blessing that exceeded our expectations. With four children now under the age of six, we feel like our plate is very full, but our oldest, Noah, has already informed us that we need two more! If we indeed arrive at that conclusion one day, we will look to Adoption Ark and Alla to make it a reality. In the short term, we have decided to host a high school senior from Kazakhstan as part our commitment to Joshua’s homeland, to assure that we continue to learn about the Kazakh culture and heritage.
Thank you so much for all you do and may God continue to bless your efforts.
Dan and Megan Santee