A Good Saturday!

Dear friends and family! Thank you for your fervent
prayers! We thought we would be really bored this weekend and not be able
to accomplish much. Well, Saturday turned out to be the best day
yet! This morning, we met with a Christian lawyer here who has spent time in the U.S. and even teaches law here in Lusaka.
He is very young to be so successful. We had lunch with him to discuss how
he could help us and what his fees would be. His fees were remarkably
lower than we had even dared to guess!!! He is very well connected, but
also very ethical and honest. He understands Western culture very well as
well as “timelines” and “schedules”. We felt very blessed to have
“coincidentally” heard about him from some other missionaries yesterday.
The Lord’s providence has been clearly seen today!

So after our meeting with our lawyer, we rode with Steve and
Stephanie Allen (Missionaries who have adopted from the Kids Alive orphanage
and got the names of 3 possible children for us) to the Kids Alive Chikondi
orphanage. We had an amazing meeting with the man who runs the
orphanage and his wife. They have poured their lives into loving the
orphans in their home and it was clear that they want what is best for the
children. They felt much more at ease to talk about the children’s
histories after speaking with us. They expressed that when Stephanie
first told them that they knew some Americans looking for children to adopt
that they felt resistant as these children are like family to them.
However, they said that they know the children need to be in families and that
they were encouraged to know that we are Christians and would raise them in a Christian home. There are about 12 children who live with them right
now. The three we are most interested in are a 4 year old girl, a 3 year old boy, and a 3 year old girl. The first 2 were abandoned at birth and would
be very easy to adopt. The youngest's father came to visit her once when she was
about 5 months old so we may encounter some resistance from social welfare with
her. The youngest was very friendly and we feel like we would like to pursue
both girls, but if the youngest is not available we will take that as a sign from
the Lord that the boy was meant to be in our family and we will go on a massive
shopping trip for boys’ clothing:)

Here are some specific things that you can continue to pray
for:

1. That our social worker would be able to meet with the director of the orphanage on
Monday. She has to get the children’s files from him.
2. That our lawyer would be able to speed things up for us in the paperwork
department. We would be especially happy if we could have a committal
order before Darren leaves although that would be quite a miracle.
3. That it would be clear which two children were meant to be in our family.
4. That Josie would do well adjusting to this new culture, lifestyle, siblings.

-Darren, Jacky, and Josie