how did i get into fostering???

I was asked the other day -- how did i get into fostering... as i was writing i thought this would go great in the blog i have been neglecting for a month.

Where to begin? I remember sitting at home when I was in High School watching T.V. with my family when a fostering commercial came on the T.V. I remember nagging my parents for a while about fostering… this continued for months. I randomly brought it up to my parents throughout the next couple of years (after all they are fabulous parents… I mean look at me J).

I have always had a soft heart towards orphans and widows. James 1:27 has always been an area where I felt I wasn’t doing enough in. The states make it very difficult to get involved with orphanages (I don’t even know where one is located in the states). And then there is World Vision. World Vision has done a great job of promoting the need for taking care of children who have no families or have very little -- the picture of the African child my parents sponsored still didn’t feel like enough.

Once the idea of teaching in China presented itself I knew I was going to do more with orphans there -- since they are literally EVERYWHERE. I pictured my life in China and orphanages seemed like it would be a huge part of my life.

To work for ISC every applicant (if you can get far enough in the process) has to do a psych analysis. So I was shipped off to Kalamazoo, Michigan. It is there where I quickly did all the tests on whether or not I am feeling followed or if I feel complete as a person or if my mother has caused me irreversible damage. It is there I found out two huge things about me, as a person. Number one, I am EXTREMEMLY self-conscious (I could have saved them a ton of time and showed them my make-up bag). Number two, my expectations of how involved I wanted to be in orphanages when moving to China was unrealistic. So with those two things under my belt - I moved to China.

I moved. I began teaching. I met Therese. Therese was a volunteer school nurse who was in the process of adopting a little boy, Daniel, from a local foster-home (a woman who fosters around 25 special needs kids). I started to get involved at the Home of Joy with Therese. Therese finally (after three years) got Daniel and moved back to New Zealand. I quickly became the only foreigner at my school who was at all involved at the Home of Joy. I must have found favor in the eyes of the manager at the Home of Joy because she allowed me to foster one of her babies (which was a HUGE prayer answered for the foreigners here). Xi Shui was given to me to nurse back to health. He cried all the time and never ate. When I think about those first couple of weeks as a mother… I cringe and twitch and want to crawl up into fetal position and cry. The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life -- and that is saying a lot considering my college history. So now I am going on 10 months of fostering Shui. It has been emotionally hard, spiritually challenging, and financially draining but worth it. I still go to the orphanage every week and there is a team of high schoolers who come with me -- there are about 12 of us!!! A huge praise… I thank God every day for those young adults. Going to the foster home alone is just… discouraging. If I could draw a picture of it… it would include a lot of blacks, puke green, and browns and not happy colors.

So that is how I got baby Shui-man… it has been an up and down journey of tears and joys. Now my parents are adopting him and I will go from mom to sister -- but we won’t talk about that because tears will ruin the computer.

This past summer was my first summer in China and I kind of thought I would be bored. I have no idea why I thought that but it was not true. I got a call one evening explaining that the BIG orphanage in Shenyang had a baby girl who was about to die and needed an emergency mother. With my history and my love for orphans, naturally the doctors called me. I was to get the girl on Tuesday morning but when they went to retrieve her… they were too late. She passed away in her sleep that night. I was devastated. As I slowly put away her bedding and clothes… I would listen to Shui giggle at Baby Einstein and thank God he was given to me in time. I told the doctors to call me next time they had a baby and surely enough a couple months later I received a call. It was the first week of school. I was to pick the baby up on a Wednesday. I had all my girly things ready for a second baby. I went with the doctors to pick up with little girl who in fact turned out to be a boy. THEY DIDN’T EVEN KNOW THE SEX OF THE BABY… that infuriates me. What really gets me going is that fact it took us 30 minutes to even FIND the dying baby boy. Once I got him in my arms I was pinching myself pretty hard so not to burst out in tears. His little body. His little arms and feet. His huge starving belly. I still feel the pit in my stomach when I remember Baby John Deere (the name I gave him when I was pressured to quickly come up with a name... apparently I’m a farm girl and I didn’t even know it!). Baby John Deere was only my foster son for a couple of weeks before we found a full time family to take him on. Those weeks consisted of feedings every hour -- where I had to drop the milk in with a medicine dropper. He was starved. He was going to die. One of the scariest things I had to do. With the Lord’s blessing a stay at home mom, a dad with a very flexible job, and an angel of a teenage daughter came forward to take Baby John on full-time - an answer to prayer for this little guy.

I am still the emergency mom. I am the woman the doctors call when they need someone to take a baby. I love this. I hope if my story does turn into an article… my psych analysis woman chokes on her coffee while reading it -- and chooses to think before she tells another single woman that she can’t be who she was wired to be. A foster mom in my case. A person willing to follow James 1:27 literally and recites it all hours of the night while holding a baby who is fatherless.

i am sure i am missing whole bites and pieces... I am sure this is not complete... but its out there. 

Why do you do what you do?