There are two adoptions ongoing with children here at Hogar Amiguitos. One of them is very close to my heart personally, as my dear friends Karel and Myra Norman from Seattle, now missionaries in Managua, are in the final (and I mean final) stages of their adoption of fifteen-year-old Nora, and interesting but joyful addition to their current family of two blonde little girls, aged 5 and 2. While the ink probably won't dry on those papers before I leave Nicaragua, I'm expecting to hear the exciting news in early January that all is said and done. Nora has told me that she's going to be calling me "aunt" once the adoption goes through, and we're right now packing up and getting ready to head to Managua on Friday to stay with the Normans, and there's a good chance that Nora won't ever have to leave them again... this week they're trying to get the two final steps finished with Mi Familia in order to have Nora live with them permanently during the last stages of the adoption process.

In the midst of the overwhelming joy of God's provision and goodness, another hoped-for family has crumbled before our eyes. It's been a six-year battle for Francys (16), Regina (12), and Ricardo (9) to be adopted by a then-childless American family (who I'll call the Greens), who fell in love with them years ago during a short-term missions trip to Hogar Amiguitos. As Joy put it, it was an adoption which never should have started. Francys's (and her siblings') mother lives right here in Jinotega, where she has custody of another one of their siblings, Francisco, who used to also be in our care. With two living parents, Francys' family is not "adoptable." Joy didn't work here when the adoption began, but according to her, no one should have ever told the Greens they could adopt these three.

I will tell this story mostly from Francys' perspective, as she is the one who has ridden this emotional roller coaster from beginning to end. When her adoption began at ten years old, the Greens hired a local lawyer for the Nicaraguan side of the paperwork, a close family friend of Francys', whom she viewed essentially as a father. For three years, he took the Greens' money and lied to them, always saying "one more paper, just this paper now," while never turning in a stitch of paperwork for their adoption. When the lie was discovered, Francys was devastated, on so many levels.

The Greens were at a crossroads, having poured out money and hopes for three years for nothing. They made the difficult decision to start the process over again with a different lawyer, and were met with the challenging truth that Francys' family were not eligible for adoption. Joy and the family's lawyer had to do a lot of work, tracking down Francys and family's birth parents, and having to persuade them to give up their children as abandoned so that they would be eligible for a better life and an America-sized opportunity. Eventually, this piece of the puzzle fell in to place. The Mi Familia employees on the case began to shed their skepticism and actually became enthusiastic about the case. The adoption was moving forward and all looked well, until too much time passed and Francys turned 16 years old.

Children in Nicaragua cannot be adopted over the age of 16. On Francys' sixteenth birthday, she recieved an e-mail from the Greens saying that they loved her very much, but now that she was 16 they wouldn't be able to adopt her. Francys received this devastating news and another broken heart.

This wasn't exactly the truth. Joy and the lawyers were working hard to have Mi Familia make an exception due to the extenuating circumstances that a) Francys' adoption was part of the adoption of a larger family unit, and b) the adoption process had been begun before (and well before, mind you) Francys turned 16.

Permission was given, and the adoption once again held promise. Momentum built as Mi Familia strove to help the Greens, and eventually everything was in order and on the verge of completion. For the past six months or so, everything has been finished here on the Nicaraguan end, with Mi Familia employees assuring Joy that once the Greens submit their paperwork from the States, they'll push the thing through.

The American paperwork never came. Joy returned from three months in the States and resumed her work and communications with the Greens, and told them that they were on the verge of losing the thing again, that the Nicaraguan paperwork would soon expire if they didn't submit their American paperwork and the $2000 adoption fee, and the Greens stated that their situation had changed, they're no longer employed, can't afford the fee, and that without employment, they won't get permission to adopt. They've changed their strategy. They've decided to sell everything, move to Nicaragua, and begin the adoption process again.

This new plan will take years, and guarantees that they will not be able to adopt Francys. While they may still have a window of opportunity to adopt Regina and Ricardo, this moment in time is their last and only chance for Francys. And while their new pipe dream is a remote possibility, it doesn't hold water and is predicated on a host of unlikely odds - selling their house on the current American housing market, moving to a country where they don't speak the language, finding employment in fields where they have no experience. Despite Joy's urging that they get it together and stick to the original (and so close to completion we can taste it) plan, they've determined that this new road is the best one, directly against the explicit counsel of all involved lawyers.

Last week, Francys sat down with Joy for a Skype conversation with the Greens, where she was devastated and blindsided by the final truth of the matter. The Greens won't be adopting her. Her home is, and will always be, Hogar Amiguitos. She walked out of the office, tear stained and bruised yet again, quietly resigned that "I'm finished. That's been enough." No bitterness or anger, but a desire to keep her heart out of the battlefield from now on.

This all breaks my heart because honestly, Francys is my hero. If you could have the pleasure of sitting with her on the porch of Hogar Amiguitos as I have and hear her life story, I am certain that admiration and awe for this young woman would well up in you as well. Her 16-year history is an epic story of beauty and pain, most of the beauty emanating from the power of Christ in her to bring forgiveness and understanding to the unforgivable and incomprehensible.

Recently Francys saw her mother at her other brother's sixth-grade promotion. Drunk and nervous, her mother was completely unprepared to play her role in her son's monumental day. Francys found herself once again donning the role of mother to her mother, as she was to her siblings as well for most of her childhood, combing her mother's hair, doing her makeup, making her presentable, with Joy giving Francys' mother the gift she'd brought for Francisco so that he would not experience the embarrassment of meeting his mother empty-handed during the gift-giving part of the ceremony. Joy described what it was like to see Francys act the mother, while her own mother said she was "too nervous," "couldn't do it, and why don't you just do it, Francys?" Francys firmly told her mother that she was here, and it was her job.

Francys told me that she overheard someone ask her mother if she and Francys were sisters, and that her mother responded, "No, she's just a friend."

She's been taking it for sixteen years, and you'd think she'd have seen it all by now, from a mother that taught her as a child how to mix liquors to make them even stronger, and how to do drugs, when she should have been teaching her how to read. But her mother's creative capacity for inflicting hurt and destruction on her children appears to have not yet reached its most profound low. Hearing her mother disown her publicly on what should have been an occasion for maternal pride was just such an experience.

What amazes me about Francys is her stability and security where she is, directly in the centre of the will of God. She clings to the love and protection that God has provided her at the hands of Joy and holds to its promise and protection in the face of every conceivable offense. She is filled with contentment and peace in the midst of enraging personal injustice. She martyrs herself daily for the siblings she protected and raised before coming to Hogar Amiguitos (she hasn't yet shared with them that the adoption won't be happening for her, as adoption still remains a possibility for them). And since she's come to Hogar Amiguitos, she's had to learn how to let them go, that her job is not to parent them but to be a child herself.

There's not much childlike about her. Even Joy says she often has to remind herself that Francys is only sixteen, on those occasions when Francys does something uncharacteristically age-appropriate. Truth and wisdom flow out of her mouth when she talks about her early misfortunes and her later experiences. Her heart is set after Christ's own heart, and it is her saving grace.

God's will for Francys is firmly set, and it is good, rich with blessing and promise. If you look with the right eyes, you will see it woven all through the tapestry of heartache and abandonment. God's will, it seems, does not include an American adoptive family. But it certainly does seem to include a firm, dedicated, unmarried American woman who raises Nicaraguan children to love and serve their God in the days of their youth.

Generally, according to Joy, new kids learn quickly here as the others take him or her under their wings and show them the ropes. So it has been with Janiel, for the most part. I've been actually quite surprised at how quickly he's adjusted to the rules and consequences here, especially when I recall the first few epic battles of will. But really, I think he's too young to really feel empowered to challenge the authorities. And, he's not a bad kid.

I held my breath for a few of the "firsts"; his first visit to the cancha (he ran outside and down the hill and had to be carried back in, after which he laid down on the floor by his chair and cried), his first few mornings of participating in our daily two-hour work-time (gardening, grass-cutting, raking, etc), and his first time having to drink his milk laced with Amoxicillin. But honestly, I haven't had to have the same fight with Janiel more than once so far. I'd say he's getting along quite well.

*****

On Sunday we decorated the Christmas tree! This is one story that can be better told with photos...

Xochilt assembling a Christmas drum ornament.

Jeyson preparing to hang the stockings.

Jonathan wraps the tree with coloured lights.

Joy and the children adding the final touches to the tree.