A Message from Ben Moll:
Mandi and I would like to thank everyone who has supported our family financially and through prayer during our journey towards adoption. We also wanted to update everyone on where we are in that process and all the things we have seen God do over the last year.
For almost a year we have been working on our dossier. This consisted of our home study, adoption trainings, physicals and blood work for Mandi and I, a 600 question psych eval, bank statements, background checks and fingerprinting, documents from The U.S Citizenship and Immigration department to approve us for adoption, a personal letter written to the Haitian government requesting to adopt from their country and about a dozen other items that are required to adopt from Haiti. We are excited to announce that it is completed and has made it safely to Haiti. Any day now we should be notified that our dossier has been “legalized” by Haiti's foreign affairs making our dossier officially registered and that will put us in the waiting period. It is uncertain how long we will be waiting for a referral. While we wait we still have a lot to do. We have more adoption training that needs to be completed. This training will help us better understand some of the difficulties we might face with adoption. On top of this training, we have documents that will expire and need to be renewed and updated. So even though our dossier is complete we will still be working to keep everything up to date. Another item on our list while we wait is finding a pediatrician who specializes in international adoption (preferably Haitian adoptions). Once we have a referral we will have 2 weeks to review and either accept or decline. Having a doctor lined up to review the medical documents of the referred child is necessary. We also will begin to prepare our home for this child. Since we won’t know the age or gender until we have a referral there’s not a lot we can do but we have started collecting some furniture and also studying Haitian cooking.
Over this past year we have seen God work in some very amazing ways. I’d like to share a few of them with you. As most of you know, international adoption is very expensive. Early on in the process while talking with our Pastor I mentioned ideas of refinancing our house or other loans to pay for it. Our pastor quickly shot those ideas down and said God will provide. We chose not to pursue loans or borrowing money and decided to trust God to provide. We started a fundraiser at Adopttogether.org and sent it out to friends, family, our church and social media. We were blown away by the response. God provided! Within the first couple months around $30,000 was raised. Our church did a “Soup and Sweets” fundraiser and raised another $4,000. On top of that, multiple people have sent us money to put towards our travel fees for when we go to Haiti to meet our future child.
Gathering all the needed documents during the “pandemic” proved to be very difficult. Every document needed to be notarized and then sent to Harrisburg to be State Certified. Hiring a mobile notary to follow us to every appointment, meeting, or business to have dozens of documents notarized would have cost a fortune. But God provided! Not just one but two of our close friends were both willing and able to help us, sometimes with only a few hours notice. We were able to get almost all of the documents notarized for free.
Once we completed everything on our end we had to overnight the dossier to our adoption specialist in Texas. There ended up being a mix up with her address and after a week our dossier still had not arrived. We were able to find the mistake and fix it. After waiting another week the package had still not arrived. Mandi made some very frantic phone calls to the carrier to find out where it was. They informed us that they delivered it to an address they determined to be correct based on our adoption specialist last name. This was not the correct address and the carrier could not/ would not help us any further. So at this point every bit of our personal information that we spent almost a year gathering and spent $20,000 on had been sitting at a strangers house in Texas for almost a week. We contacted our adoption specialist and waited for a response. After what seemed like an eternity, in reality it was a few hours, we received an email saying she had the package! God protected it! The address it was delivered to was only 15 minutes from her and she was able to drive there and retrieve the unopened package from a very nice old lady.
This last story still gives me chills. Late last year, before the fundraiser took off, I purchased a vehicle that needed the engine replaced. The idea was to fix and sell it to help fund the adoption. That project got put aside due to how busy we were working on the dossier and the success of the fundraiser. This past May, about 6 months later, as we were finishing up with the dossier I decided to finally fix the car. It took a few weeks to get everything repaired on it to the point I could sell it. It was up for sale for a while with many people interested but still hadn’t sold. I was getting very frustrated with people not showing up. One Friday I had driven the car to work and had a guy message me who wanted to see it and he could come right then. I got the car cleaned up. The only thing left in the car was an envelope. In that envelope was the title to the car and our approval letter from the U.S Citizenship and Immigration Department saying we had been approved to adopt from Haiti. When the guy showed up to see the car I noticed he had an accent. I couldn’t tell exactly where he was from so I asked him. He responded “We are from Haiti”. I was shaking when I pulled the letter out and showed him the final document to our Haitian adoption dossier. After introducing me to his wife we stood and talked for an hour. They were extremely excited for us and offered to help us any way they could. God provided! He provided something we didn’t even know we needed. He provided us with Haitian friends that after only knowing for an hour felt like family. A few days after selling them the car my new friend and I sat down and talked for over an hour. He told me a lot about Haiti I never knew. He also promised to help us with travel arrangements when we go to Haiti. And it turns out his wife teaches French and Creole at a university. She will be able to help us with translating once we bring our child home. God bringing our families together when he did is just one more example of how He has guided, protected and provided for this adoption. This is only the beginning. We look forward to what God has planned and thank Him daily for all he has done.