Why Moldova- Part 1

The Monday before school started back I was in a meeting when I got a text from Alex, one of our students in the youth group. It was a group message with my husband, Kyle, and she said she wanted to ask us a favor. Her family is hosting a foreign exchange student from Germany and their student's friend had been placed in a bad home. She was being forced to clean up after them, babysit their kid, and they were being mean to her. She was uncomfortable in the home and wanted to know if we would be open to hosting her. 


Kyle and I texted back and forth until we got home and could talk face to face. My immediate answer was "no". It would be so inconvenient for us. Honestly, I did not want to have wear pants around the house, shuttle her places, or cook for her- I mean I barely cook for us as it is! Kyle, being as level-headed as he is, said we needed to pray about it.


Tuesday I was on the way to another meeting and Kyle and I were on the phone. We realized all the reasons we didn't want to do this were selfish. It came down to me thinking that if I was in this girl's situation, I would want someone normal to take me in. Kyle filled out all the paperwork and the area director came over Thursday night to do our home study- which is a terrible name and gave us a false sense of what a home study actually is! What happened next is what changed our world.


When the area director, Daniel, came over he brought one of the students that his family is hosting- a girl from Moldova. The conversation went like this:


Daniel: This is Alaina
Us: Hi Alaina
Daniel: She is from Moldova
Us: Oh okay, cool!
Daniel: Do you know where that is?
Us: …no…


We had no idea this was God's way of introducing us to the country our daughter would be from. 


We ended up not hosting that student because they checked into her story only to find she was embellishing some of the facts and they weren't going to move her. The area director said he would forward the profiles of some students that still needed a host family for us to look over. Once he left I told Kyle "no" once again. We were doing this to help out one specific girl. It didn't work out, so that's it. He made me look at the profiles anyway- he is learning not to give into my stubbornness. We came across one girl's profile and I read the 25 pages about four or five times. She seemed so sweet, and like she would fit into our family well. It also said that she understood she might never get placed in a home because she has pretty bad allergies to cats and dogs and most families have at least one. Kyle and I don't have any animals and we felt this was God's way of telling us that this was our student. 


Fast forward about three months. When Kyle and I started talking seriously about adopting, I started doing research on different countries that participated in international adoption. I was on this website reading the different requirements to adopt from different countries and I ran across Moldova. I remembered that's where Alaina is from, and I clicked and read all I could. We met the requirements, so I started googling and reading all the blogs that were out there- which weren't many. Moldova closed their international adoption program a couple of years ago, and it has only recently been reopened. Because of this, there aren't very many people in the adoption process in Moldova, and no one has completed the process since they reopened. Kyle and I went on a walk one night and talked it all over. We talked about how sex-trafficking is so rampant over there (that's another blog post all in itself) and how we should try to adopt a little girl. 


Hosting Laura has been one of the best decisions we have made during our marriage- we could not have asked for a better experience than what we have had with her. We know that hosting a 16 year-old foreign exchange student is not the same as adopting a toddler, but we know that God is working on our side for our good. 


P.S. Moldova is here:



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