From China to India

Before this Spring, Brian and I tried for about 2 1/2 years to plan a short-term trip to work at an orphanage somewhere in China. We have a heart for children with special needs and thought this would be an opportunity for us to use our skills (Brian=PT and Meg=OT) and learn more about a country we wanted to adopt from someday.  We researched so many different orphanages and organizations that we could work with there, sent what felt like a million e-mails, filled out applications, and did everything we could possibly do to make contacts there. It seemed like nothing would come together. We talked with one reliable organization about coming to work with their program for a few weeks and we were told we had to learn to speak Chinese fluently, agree to come back and work every year and stay for extended periods of time. This obviously was not realistic for us and we had to decline. We could not find any other orphanages that were consistent enough in their responses to feel good about buying plane tickets to travel to a place we had never been to meet up with people we didn’t know.  After 2 years we began to take this as a sign that God did not want us to go to China, at least not at this time. So we began our search for another country…

Not long after we decided to start searching for another country we could travel to some of our best friends, Grant & Nicole, returned to America from India for a few months. We had the opportunity to have them stay at our house for a few days (which we loved-especially because we got to meet their newborn baby-one of the cutest kids in the world, Jack!) We had such a fun time hearing about their life in India and by the time they left that weekend we were pretty sure we were going to India! Within a week we had made reliable contact with an orphanage in Delhi that said they would love for us to come. Things quickly started to fall in place and we had such a peace about India that we went ahead and bought tickets to go for 2 weeks the next Spring.