DTR 16 Months

DTR 16 Months


We thought December was going to be the big month, and I remember a year ago thinking that 2011 was going to be a big year for our adoption. Well both have come and gone and not much has happened. The latest news in our adopt ion is that MIGEPROF no longer governs adoption in Rwanda. In order to better focus on adoption and children’s issues, they have started the National Children’s Commission in Rwanda, which will now preside over all children’s affairs in the country. Currently, MIGEPROF’s staff is transitioning over to the Commission. Once the staff is fully transitioned, we are hopeful the Ministry will resume the referral matching process. Currently, adoption and the National Children’s Summit are their top priorities. We are encouraged by their initiative in improving the adoption processing. So while they are in transition we will wait and hope and pray that this will help the adoption process for us and for all the adoptions to come. Most importantly we hope this helps the children of Rwanda!!

Thank you again for all your prayers and support. We had some dear friends clean out a lot of their baby stuff and donate to us. It was such a blessing and encouragement.

Thank you!!

DTR 15 months

In the Holding Pattern

I was hoping to have some GREAT news for you at this time, but instead I just have some news. As many of you know Dec 10th is a 6 month deadline for our dossier approval. Previously we were told that if Rwanda was not able to refer our children to us by this time that they would close our case. Well that has changed. The good news is that our case will not be closed come Dec 10th; they will keep working on our case until it is done, Ya!! The flip side of this is that they do not know when they will get to our case, it could be 6 weeks or 6 months we don’t know. So that is kind of frustrating when we have been hoping and planning on traveling during Dec, but we know that God’s timing in all of this will be perfect in all of this. Recently we also received some news that our case is at the Ministry’s office. It has not gone to the orphanage yet, because the nun’s at the orphanage have a stack of cases that they are working on right now. When they have finished with those cases then they will get new ones to work on. We don’t know when our case will move on to the orphanage, but it is encouraging to know that they are talking about us and they know where our dossier is at. So we are back in the holding pattern.
We have been encouraged by so many people, and so many people are praying for us it has been great. It is been wonderful to see how the body of Christ has come together and lifted us up in prayer; we couldn’t do this without it! Thank you all so much!!
Jill

DTR 14 months

Well the travel group is done with all their paperwork and should be heading back to the states soon. We are so thankfully that most things have gone pretty smooth for them!!

We just had our home study update visit today, and it went very well. It was more of a logistical thing than any thing else. Since we had a new social worker on our case and it has been almost two years since we did our home study, they needed to just check in on us. When we get the paper work on the update notarized and to us, then we will mil it to USCIS and wait for them to update another form called our I-171H. All this has to be done just in case we travel and do not make it back into the US before Dec.28, 2011.

I am still hopeing to travel during the month of Dec, even though we have no proff of this happening yet. Now that it is Nov every day I get a little more excited, and worried all at the same time. This reminds me of when you are pregnant and every kick or cramp you wonder is it time to go to the hospital!! But when I was pregnant I knew when we were getting close because my tummy got bigger and bigger. With the adoption I have no idea when it is going to happen, one morning I will wake up and there will be an email with the picture of my children!! My husband says it kind of like the man side of child birth, one day you get a phone call and it's time to go to the hospital, and then you have a child!! I told him i would not be a very good husband waiting for that phone call.

I have kept myself busy with knitting a baby hat, which I'm on my third attempt, the first two have been way to big. I also have some fabric to make baby blankets, since it will be very cold here for them. We haven't gotten brother and sisters bedroom ready yet, still waiting to see how old they are. But I have lots of things on standby ready to go so it should be pretty easy to do. Please keep us In your prayers for pations and endurance as we wait this month out one day at a time.

Travel group

Just wanted to let you know that a group of people from our adoption agency are all in Rwanda now.  I will try and attch links to there blogs so you can follow along their adoption journey. 

http://recyclingforrwanda.blogspot.com/
http://mitchellfamilysix.blogspot.com/
http://accebersjourneytoafrica.blogspot.com/
http://avintagefaith.blogspot.com/

Please keep all these families in your prayers over the next three weeks.
James 1:17, "Pure and lasting religion in the sight of god our Father means that we must care for orphans and windows in their troubles, and refuse to let the world corrupt us."
Love
Jill

DTR 13 Months

DTR 13 Months

Our paperwork has been in Rwanda now 13 months!! Wow!! The other big date that we are looking to is December 10. We should get our referral (be matched with our kids) on or before this date, but this date too is not concrete either, like all things in this adoption it could take longer (but we are praying that we will be together for Christmas!!).


TRAVEL GROUP
The other good news is that three AWAA families are getting ready to travel!! There is only one blog to follow if you wanted to follow their trip to Rwanda. This family is amazing!!
http://accebersjourneytoafrica.blogspot.com
SIX LEFT
In the AWAA Rwanda program there are only six families left (including us) who have not received referrals!! When Rwanda quick accepting dossiers and assigned all of our dossiers numbers, there were 28 families in the AWAA Rwandan program, and our family is 3ed from last on the list. Many of us in this group started tracking and praying and fasting for these families. It has been amazing to see how God has answered so many prayers and brought home so many children to their forever family!!
Now I have started paperwork to update our home study which will lead to updating other paperwork. It is kind of nice to have some work to do on the adoption after having so long with nothing to do but wait. I feel like we are in the final stretches of this and covet your prayers. First for the families traveling in Oct/Nov., second that we would be with our Rwandan children for Christmas.

Thanks so much for your support
Jill & Tim Bruno

Movement

I just wanted to share with all of you how excited we are for several families in the adoption process. Three families in our AWAA Rwanda group have received referrals!! It has been a at least three months or so since anyone on our group has received any referrals. The other very cool thing is that there are only eight people in our group who have not received referrals. ( that I know about). Only eight of us waiting for referrals!! That is amazing!! You see when we were assigned numbers, a long time ago, there were 125 people in front of us waiting for referrals, and 30 of them were in our group. I feel like we have prayed and fasted through so many adoptions and now we are down to the final 8 !! praise God!! I am so over joyed!!

Approval!!

Muraho!
Muraho
Amakuru Ki?
Nimeza Cyane.

We have been working on our Keneyrwandan, and this is the fist basic frase that we know so fare.  We also received some great news yesterday along with several other people. We found out that our paperwork has been approved by the Rwandan government since July 10th!! So that means that we have been approved to adopt from Rwandan.  It also means that hopefully our paperwork has been moved to the orphanage and the nuns are looking at it and matching us with our two kids!!  The Rwandan government gives us 6 months to be matched with a child.  That means that on or before Dec 10 we will hopefully see our kids!

4th ofJuly

W had a fun and relaxing weekend. Our sons birthday is on the 3rd so we went to some wonderful friends house and lots of fun all day long. Then on the 4th they came to our house. The guys went fishing in the morning then. Had lunch and some naps then back out fishing again! For those of you who don't know we live in AK so the 4th is always a little different. It doesn't get dark so no fireworks to end the night and it's only about 65 degrees so not to hot either. But fishing here can be kind of fun. And this year I caught a once in a life time size fish. So we were out in the boat with our friends having a fun time just chill in. Well something started messing with my hook so I set the hook and the fight was on. I don't know how long it took but the fish just sat there like a big log and I couldn't get it to move. So with some wonderful help of my husband we eventually got that fish to come up and my husband netted it and it was big. At the doc it weight in at 59 lb!! So that made my summer!! I will try and upload a pic soon.

Juno update

Well there is another family with our adoption agency traveling right now. So here is there blog ang a very cute video they posted a couple of days go.
http://cassadas.blogspot.com/
By the end of June we will be DTR 10 months. We could be getting close to herring something. At least in the next 8 months or so. :-).
Tim had the opportunity to preach a couple of weeks ago and he preached on adoption! He did a great job and it was a great sermon.
Well that is all that has been going on for now thanks for following alone for so long.

Another travel group!!

Yes there are back to back travel groups!! There are about nine families in this travel group and several of them have blogs so I wanted to try and put this on here for any of you wanted to follow along.

http://jabrannon.blogspot.com

http://sharps2rwanda.blogspot.com

http://www.growingalittlebranch.com

http://grace-embrace.blogspot.com

http://thebowersparable.blogspot.com

There you go have fun following a long and praying for all of them
By the way we are at 8 month of waitting
Thanks
Jill Bruno
#125

DTR 7 months

DTR 7 Months



At the end of March we will have had our dossier in Rwanda for 7 months now!! That is kind of exciting to me because it means we are getting closer now. There has been a lot going on in the Rwandan adoption program recently. Today in fact, six families from AWAA are traveling together in a group to Rwanda. They will be there about three weeks while they get their kids!! This is so excited to think that 6 families will see their children they have been waiting for ( many in this group have been waiting over 2 years since the time they were accepted into the Rwandan adoption program) and 6 or more children will be with their forever family for the first time!! Two of the families have blogs that you can follow along if you are interested.


http://www.plannedlongago.blogspot.com/

 http://www.addingasmith.blogspot.com/

We are all praying for these six families that the Lord straighten out the path in front of them and all their appointments and meeting will go very well. We are also praying for all the kids left at home while their parents leave for three weeks, this can be hard on some of the little kids left at home.


There also were two families who adopted independently from Rwanda, and they had two blogs with great video and pictures. I love to look at these because it gives a glips into what it looks like in Rwanda, and at Home of Hope.


http://lotstolearnbutmoretolove.blogspot.com/


http://theschulzfam.blogspot.com/


News on our adoption is that some of our paperwork has expired, but we are not in too much of a hurry to update it, because it will expire again next year. So we are going to wait a little bit then update it. This is a little hard for me, because I don’t like have overdue, or outdated, or late anything. But our fear is that if we update it now and say this Dec we get our referral, and then travel in the next two months after that, it will be March again and our paperwork will be outdated and we will be getting to travel all at the same time. So we are hopeing that waiting a little bit to update will work in our advantage in the future, We will see.


Thank you for all your prayers and support,


Jill B

DTR 5 Months

DTR 5 Months on Jan 30th

Well January started off with a big bang!! In the adoption world there was a lot going on, there were 20 or more approvals that were given to families. An approval is a letter from Rwandan Gov’t saying your family can adopted from this country. Two months after receiving your approval letter you should get your referral. A referral is a picture of your child and their medical information. So you can see why approvals are very exciting, especially when you have been waiting for one for 18months!! So like I said January started out very exciting with 20 or more families receiving approval letters. Not all of these families were with AWAA, some of these people are with other adoption agencies in European countries, others are adopting independently, but there were quite a few with our agency. This was all very exciting, and brought hopes of us maybe receiving a approval letter sometime this summer!!


Now for the past couple of weeks we have had no word from Rwanda. No Approval letters, no referrals, not much going on. This is typical those of the adoption process. It reminds me of being at the airport were you are always in a hurry just to wait, and wait, and wait.


We are at the point in our adoption were we need to update our home study. This is something we had done a year ago with a social worker through the state. So I have some more paperwork to get started on. I also have had the opportunity to talk about our adoption at church for different groups of people and that has been nice. Also it is neat to hear people from church asking about our adoption and they too are getting excited for us to bring home our other kidoos. One benefit of having a long wait is all the people that are getting excited for us, and it is neat to see God at work all around us.


Thank you all again for your prayers and support, we are in this together.


Jill

DTR 4 months

On December 30th we were DTR (dossier in Rwanda) 4 months. Things are moving right along well. Not much has happened directly with our adoption, but that is to be expected. We are hoping a praying that by Christmas 2011 that we will be home with all of our kids. There are roughly 100 people in front of us waiting to adopt. I did have the opportunity to share with a group of ladies about what God has taught me so far during this adoption process. This was very exciting!! And in the process I was able to share the gospel too!!



Even though there is not much with our adoption that has been happening there is a lot of excitement with the Rwandan adoption program. Over the past month we have found out that the ministry has hired a couple more people to help process the dossiers. This in turn has lead to five families receiving a letter from the ministry called a non-objection or approval letter. What this means is that these five families have been given permission from the Ministry to adopt from Rwanda. After a family receives this letter then their information is passes on to the orphanage where the nuns who choose a child or children for that family. Then the nuns write a letter or recommendation to the ministry about the child and this is approved by the ministry and then send on to the families in a letter called a referral. I know this is all very confusing to someone who is not in the middle of it all, but to families that are adopting each one of these steps is so exciting and more importantly one step closer to seeing their children!! So we praise God and thank Him for answering our prayers.


Hope you all had a good Christmas and New Years, and thanks for following along with our adoption journey.


Jill