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Originally Posted by svaldez  Kallista - Yes! I am on the Seacoast! We have been planning to use Wide Horizons and were going to sign up for the Korean Program but they put it on hold. Now we are looking into Ethiopia. How was your friends experience with WH and Ethiopia? Wow, the culture camp sounds terrific. Great to know because my husband was a bit concerned. He is Mexican, from Cali, and even though NH has become so much more progressive and diverse over the years, sometimes he still feels a little discrimination from time to time. It is definitely better though. He is just a little worried.
Thank you both so much for your responses and congrats to you both on your adoptions!!
Sharon |
Hi Sharon,
Have you connected with the Greater Seacoast Adoptive Parents group? If you google I bet you can find it. They were on Yahoo but they switched to another host. They have a really active group. The person we know who adopted from Ethiopia is a single mom who adopted 3.5 years ago. She had a great experience with WHFC. I've actually never heard anything bad about them except that they are expensive. If we adopted again I would probably go through them or WACAP. I really like WACAP's grant programs for older and special needs kids. However, WHFC is in our backyard!
We went to an info session and met a woman and her Ethiopian-American toddler. It was a great experience.
For some reason we didn't feel pulled to Ethiopia, not sure why. We looked at Liberia and then Liberia shut down, luckily before we put a bunch of money in. The agency was also having some issues so we decided to look around before we sent our first big payment in. I found a picture of siblings from Russia on an agency site and emailed about them. I got a response that the kids weren't available but there were waiting girls from Kyrgyzstan and that we qualified for hat country. They sent photos and our daughter's photo was one of them. It was all Kyrgyzstan from then on!
Everyone we know was fine with us adopting transracially. I was nervous about learning to handle Black hair! I was also concerned about racism. I work for the miltiary and there are some naive people (about all races) but overall I have found people to be very welcoming. We lived over in the Keene area when we started and that area is very open it seems. Now we live in Hillsboro, not sure how it would go over here. To me it is obvious my daughter is adopted but people don't always realize it at first even though, hello, she is Asian and we aren't! If she was from ethiopia it would be a lot more obvious but I think we would be okay. Most of the time I like the attention because we can educate people about adoption, specifically of older and "special needs" kids (I put that in quotes because what we consider special needs and what other countries consider special needs is very different). We have people stop and talk to us all the time who ask questions and say God Bless and she's so lucky. We make sure to tell them that we are the blessed/lucky ones to have her.
Our blog is
www.elizabethandbill.blogspot.com, it chronicles our adoption journey. I'm sure there are tons of Ethiopian adoption blogs out there too.