Starke County residents, Phil and Megan Hamand, are in the process of adopting a child from the Ukraine.
“We actually put our application in to adopt in July of 2010 so things are going pretty quickly,” said Megan. “We just found out last week that we should be traveling to the Ukraine to meet our child at the end of August, maybe beginning of September of this year. That’s a pretty quick adoption turnaround. Ukraine as approved our home study, which is a big step, and right now we’re just getting all of our international paperwork put together so we can legally adopt the child from Ukraine and the United States.”
We asked Megan how she found an International adoption agency to help them in their adoption process.
“Quite honestly, we looked on Google,” she replied. “We just started Googling international adoptions. My aunt also adopted a child from China so she has been a great resource. We kind of felt isolated that no one knew anything about adoptions. Nobody really talked about it until we started to say ‘this is what we’re doing’.”
Megan talks a little about their adoption agency and why they chose to adopt a child from the Ukraine.
“We got hooked up with an agency called America World Adoption and they have different countries that they’re accredited to adopt in. We started looking into different countries and Ukraine sort of stuck out in our minds because we do have friends that are first generation Ukrainian. They know a lot about the culture and the language and it kind of just worked out perfectly. It’s just one of those things where it just seemed to fit together.”
Megan said she and her husband will not know if they will be adopting a boy or a girl:
“Ukraine is unique in the fact that you don’t know anything about the child when you get there. You don’t get a referral and then go meet the child. You go to Ukraine, you get a few referrals and you have to choose one, which is going to be pretty much impossible. We won’t know anything until we get there. Most likely it will be a boy. We’re probably looking at someone around two years old.”
A fundraiser to help the Hamand family in their adoption process will be held on Saturday, February 26th beginning, at 6:00 p.m. CT. A Christian Rock Concert is planned with music from Narrow Gate, one80, and Brandon Grelle at Our Redeemer Lutheran Church in Knox. Admission price is $10.00.
