This is the first in a series of columns I will devote to the adoption journey my wife, Claudette, and I started in 2005. Hank Bond, publisher and editor of the Greenup Beacon, asked that we share our story with you. Maybe you have an interest in adoption or know someone who does. If so, I hope this information is helpful to you.

For those of you who regularly read my column here in the Greenup Beacon, you’ve read some of my columns I devoted to our personal story about our adoption of Josie Claire Siyan Hapney, our daughter we adopted from China in 2007. While I have touched on important highlights of our “Journey to Josie,” I’ve never really delved into the process we followed to bring our daughter to her forever family and forever home.

In 2000, our oldest child, Brock was born. Blake, our middle child, was born in late 2001. Claudette and I discussed adding a daughter to our family. We prayed about it and God led us to adoption.

There are many children throughout the United States and world who need forever families. In 2005, we began to seriously consider adopting a daughter.

According to the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute in Washington, D.C., there are 400,540 children in the United States who are living without permanent families, of which 115,000 are eligible for adoption. Worldwide, there are approximately 153 million orphans who have lost one parent. Nearly 18,000,000 orphans have lost both parents. These children/babies live in orphanages, in foster care, or on the streets. They are faced daily with disease, malnutrition, and death.

The U.S. State Department indicates that U.S. families adopted more than 9,000 children in 2011, the highest number from China, followed by Ethiopia, Russia, South Korea, and Ukraine.

After deciding we would adopt our daughter versus having another biological child, we began researching adoption here in the United States. We began calling agencies in the U.S. to inquire about foster to adopt. Door after door began closing in our faces. Everywhere we turned we learned of the difficulty we would and could face adopting in the U.S. This may not be the case for everyone who considers domestic adoption. In fact, we have friends and relatives who have adopted children from the U.S.

Adoption is a very personal journey. No two adoptions are ever completely alike. As people of faith, my wife and I believe God has a plan for every person and family. His plan for some is for them to adopt from the United States or another country. It was God’s plan for us to go to China to get our daughter and bring her home to live with her forever family. I’m absolutely confident He gives us our children in different and amazing ways.

In 2006, Claudette and I began heavily researching Chinese adoption. We prayed about it and felt God’s guidance in adopting our daughter from China. At that time, I was a professor of English and communication in the Department of English and Humanities at Shawnee State University. Our departmental secretary, Elsie Shabazz, introduced me to a math professor who, as God’s plan would have it, held the office three doors down from mine in Massie Hall on the SSU campus.

Doug Darbro, Ph.D., and his wife, Tonia, had already adopted one daughter, Sadie, from China (they later adopted there daughter, Bailey, from there, too). Elsie knew we were planning to adopt our daughter from China. She thought it would be helpful to us to meet the Darbros and learn about what they experienced adopting from China. This was a tremendously helpful piece of God’s plan for us.

Piece by piece, God was paving our way to China. We took on A Helping Hand adoption agency in Lexington to help us with our international adoption. A Helping Hand is a Christian interdenominational ministry dedicated to serving orphans around the world through adoptions. The agency specializes in domestic adoptions as well as international adoptions from China, Hong Kong, Panama, Nicaragua, and Peru.

We had two options. We could wait for a placement of a baby from China or we could adopt a waiting child. Waiting children are, typically, toddlers or older children who are ready for placement and simply waiting for an adoptive family to express interest in them. One other factor that can play into the waiting child option is children who have special needs.

Many of the children we learned about who were waiting children in China had physiological issues such as heart problems, cleft lip, cleft palate, and hemangiomas (benign tumors with blood vessels).

We waited and waited and waited for a placement. The longer we waited for a traditional placement, the more God was dealing with our hearts to open up our home to a waiting child who was classified as special needs. Also, the longer we waited for our placement, the more couples we encountered who had adopted from China.

While waiting for a placement, Claudette found an adoption agency in Birmingham, Ala., called Lifeline Children’s Services. It is a full-service adoption and orphan care ministry that serves families and children in the Unites States and across the globe. It began as a domestic adoption ministry.

It was on Lifeline’s website where we first saw our daughter. Wu Si Yan was an 18-month-old girl who was left on the sidewalk just outside the gates of the Social Welfare Institute in Suzhou, China in July 2004. The staff members there estimated her to be 1-day-old when she was found in a box wearing a diaper and holding a piece of cloth.

Wu Si Yan was listed as “Bridget” on Lifeline’s website. Claudette inquired about her. A staff member of Lifeline, Karla, was the most helpful individual with whom we had dealt in terms of agencies. She was wonderful! She provided us with an extensive amount of information about Wu Si Yan. We saw photographs and read health (physical and psychological) information. She was a very loving little 18-month-old girl who enjoyed eating bananas, watching “The Wiggles” videos, was very quiet, and was born with cleft lip and cleft palate. That said, her lip had been repaired in China.

The very day we learned about Wu Si Yan, Claudette, the boys, and I were on our way to visit our friends Doug, Tonia, and their daughter Sadie in Carlisle, Ky. They invited us to their home for dinner and to discuss adopting from China. On our way to their home, we stopped at K-Mart in Maysville. We received a call from Karla who was inquiring whether we were interested in taking our interest to the next level—starting the process of bringing Wu Si Yan home to live forever as our daughter!

What made our stop at K-Mart even more remarkable was the fact that Claudette found a Chinese baby doll named “Bridget!” Of course she bought it!

More and more signs from God were telling us to adopt Wu Si Yan, which we officially decided to do in Maysville’s K-Mart!

In next week’s column, I will get into the paperwork and process we experienced adopting Wu Si Yan.

Terry L. Hapney, Jr., Ph.D., is a professor in the W. Page Pitt School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Marshall University, and an eastern Greenup County native. He may be reached at hapney@marshall.edu.