Anna's Story

I told Anna I would tell her story after I finished sending out all of our support letters even though her Adoption Day isn't until October.

Anna's story basically started where Deborah's ended. The day after we completed Deborah's readoption (legally changing her name) we started our next adoption in March of 2004.

We went back to the same agency because we really wanted our children from the same area and this particular agency was the only one we knew of who was getting their children from Ganta, Liberia. We received a referral in June 2004 of a two week old baby boy whose mother had died in childbirth. But two weeks later got another phone call saying the little boy's aunt came and got him. So that wasn't our baby.

But then our agency got sort of stuck. Laws in Liberia were changing since the year before and more paperwork was required. The agency had no more foster homes to take in any other children so we had to wait until some of the kids were adopted before they would take any new referrals.

I was patient up to a point but was losing hope we would ever have a referral when we finally got a phone call in December 2004 saying we had a 3.5 month old baby girl. She had been in custody since she was 2 weeks old but she was an abandonment case and they could not find any relatives to sign the papers. They had had a police investigation looking for this baby's birth mother and no one could find her (or at least no one was talking about it). They met with the Tribal Chief and he gave his permission for this little one to be adopted. So the first pictures we got were of Baby Walakehwon with her caregiver Yah, Baby Walakehwon with the Tribal Chief and another picture of Baby Walakehwon sucking her thumb. The really funny thing was that the baby boy we had been referred in June just 6 months earlier was also named Walakehwon, a common name given to orphans.