Arkansas to Africa {Part 11 Delays}

Welp, I did not mean to neglect my little blog, but somehow many months have passed by and here she lays, all dusty. I am excited to get back into updating this little space more often and to finally sitting down and finishing the AR to AF series. I am finding that my memory is getting fuzzy on the details and I want to wrap this up before I completely forget it!

I have had several people ask me, "how in the world did y'all wind up in Africa"?

Most of the time that ends with me stuttering around and giving some kind of a lame answer.
Not because there isn't a really good (non-lame) answer,
but because it is hard to know where to get started.

Sooo, I thought I would begin to share the story that God wrote for us.
It is a looonng story that spans many years.
But don't worry, no chapter book today!
 I will give it to you a bit at a time!

If you want to catch up to speed, you can find:

Part 1 {here}
Part 2 {here}
Part 3 {here}
Part 4 {here}
Part 5 {here}
Part 6 {here}
Part 7 {here}
Part 8 {here}

Part 9 {here}

Part 10 {here}

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After leaving off 18 months ago {i will complete this, i will complete this}, we thought we would get approval to travel to bring our daughters home in February 2013 and move to Malawi in May 2013. We received news that changed our timeline and left us unsure of how it all was going to go down.

The United States Embassy in our girl's birth country issued a change in policy. Instead of a two week investigation before approval of visas, they were going to begin a mandatory 6 month investigation. On one hand, we were all for more checks and balances to make sure our adoption was ethical, but on the other hand, the delay felt like a punch in the gut as our girls were waiting in a transition house for us. The extra six month wait felt like an eternity. We also weren't sure that six months wouldn't actually turn into a year or more. Our girls were from a village that was a six hour flight from where the US Embassy was located. The USE had no idea of when they would actually make it to their area to perform their investigation. 

While we waited, we started our fundraising to move to Malawi. We took advantage of our girls not being home and spent four months meeting (once, twice, sometimes three meeting a day) with friends, family, and churches to find ministry partners. God performed miracles and led people to come on board with us and completely fund all of our needs. It was really a big faith building and humbling time.

Meanwhile, it looked like our girls' investigation was not going to happen anytime soon. We decided to go ahead and move to Malawi and live there until we gained permission to come and get our daughters. We sold our house and the majority of our belongings. What we didn't sell, we loaded onto a 12' x 12' space and shipped our things to Malawi. We bought tickets to move in July 2013. 

A few weeks before we moved, we received a special surprise that caused us to cancel our flights to Malawi.......

Stay tuned! I promise I will update before 18 months passes by again.