The Wall Family Love Story

Zach: Traveling to Uganda the first time really changed my outlook on life, family, and the idea of adoption.  My first trip was the first time I had been out of the country and the first time I had experienced such extreme poverty and conditions.  I have always had a heart for children but these Ugandan children hit a special place in my heart.  These children had no family, barely enough food to survive, and nothing to call a home. Until you are able to experience a glimpse into their lives and hold them and love them it’s hard to understand the hardships they have had to endure their entire lives.  I think once I experienced this, I had a small place in my heart that wanted to give an orphan/orphans a home and show them the love they deserve.

Brooke: Uganda’s culture and the simple, yet beautiful way they live their lives was something that we wanted to be a part of and live our lives invested in. We fell in love with the smells, the sounds, the voices, and most importantly the people themselves. Throughout the years we’ve traveled to do mission work in Uganda, we’ve built lasting relationships with both children and adults. On one of those trips, we met a young couple who were starting their own children’s home for children who have been affected by HIV and AIDS. They asked us to come spend several weeks with them and get it up and off the ground. When we first arrived in country, they told us about their very first child that was brought into the children’s home. They told us that he had been living with his grandmother and she couldn’t care for him any longer due to her age, farming, and lack of money.

When we first met our little boy (we aren’t using his real name online right now until he comes home to us – for now we’ll just say “M”), he was so incredibly malnourished and could barely walk at the age of 2. His hair was white, his body was swollen, and he had a hard time opening his mouth. The moment I looked at him, I knew God sent us there because he was going to be our child. I remember breaking down into tears, picking him up out of the dirt, and just holding him. I will never forget the way M smiled at me that day. Throughout the next few days he spent time with us at the orphanage but would have nothing to do with Zach. It was difficult for Zach to build a relationship with him and therefore at first Zach did not feel the same desire to adopt him as I did. Keep in mind that we were also not married yet (we were newly engaged). However, Zach knew that I felt God was asking me to be this little boy’s mother. Being the level-headed guy that he is, Zach wanted to get married first before even thinking about starting a family. He never once said “no” to me but I knew he needed God to reveal it in his heart as well. So, for the next several months (as we were wedding planning) I prayed every day that God would open Zach’s heart to the idea of M one day becoming our son. One day, I asked Zach jokingly, “so, when can we bring my sweet baby home?” He responded very confidently “let’s do it!” I started sobbing with tears of joy and excitement that God laid it on Zach’s heart to adopt as well.

Zach: I proposed the night before we left and the trip strengthened our love for Uganda and for each other. During this trip we met M and which would forever change our lives.  I could tell that the first time Brooke held M, she fell in love and never wanted to let him go.  I didn’t have the same initial connection to M – I think it was mostly because he didn’t want much to do with me and was so closed off emotionally to the both of us, which is very understandable.  Brooke immediately talked about adopting him and I kind of shrugged it off with a “we will talk about it later” or “I don’t know.”  Slowly, seeing the way Brooke was in love with M made me fall in love with him as well.  After being asked numerous times by Brooke about adopting him over the time period of a year, something finally clicked and it felt like the right thing for our family, and more importantly, the right thing for our little boy.

A year later and we got married on June 8th, 2013 in our hometown of Normal, IL at the Methodist church I grew up attending.  We made the decision to honeymoon in Uganda because we knew it would be a challenge to take trips once we both started working careers and had started a family.

Brooke: The day after we got married, we took a honeymoon to Uganda. We spent one month at the children’s home that M lived at. We worked on home repairs, taught in the local school, and met with attorneys to start his adoption. While we were there, we learned of Uganda’s adoption law that you must be married for 1 year before you can start an adoption and that at least one applicant must be 25 years old. Zach and I were both 24 and had only been married for a few days at that point! Less than 1 week before returning to America as newlyweds, I found out that we were expecting our first child. This stunned us and changed our adoption plans! We knew that we couldn’t pursue the adoption until we were 25 years old and now we were pregnant! We were both excited, but also devastated for M because we knew he so badly deserved a family and how badly we wanted to be the one for him!

October 2014, Our daughter, Delaney had just turned 6 months old and Zach and I had both just turned 25. Delaney is the apple of our eye! We can’t imagine how different our lives would be without her in it and are so thankful that God entrusted us to be her parents.

At this point we had finally met the requirements to adopt M and were ready to get started! We signed the papers with America World Adoption Agency as quickly as we could and took a giant leap of faith, trusting that God would take care of the financial piece of our adoption. We did a lot of fundraisers in the beginning to help us get going with the initial fees, home study, dossier process and etc. We had a garage sale, had a puzzle piece fundraiser, wrote grant applications, and much more! On November 11, 2014 we were officially accepted into AWAA’s Uganda Pilot program! We were 1 of only 6 families adopting from Uganda with our agency.

On November 25, 2015 we received the call we’d been waiting for! We had a court date just one week later. We immediately started rushing around, getting documents signed, packing our bags, making arrangements for Delaney, and booking flights! We were thrilled because it had been SO long since we had seen our son! We arrived in Uganda on December 2nd, one day before we were supposed to be seen in court. Reuniting with M was an experience I will never forget. It was emotional and surreal. I never wanted to let him go again. He was so happy and looked so much healthier than the last time we had seen him. He was almost ours! On the day of our hearing, December 3rd, our judge called and said he was canceling our hearing and would let us know when it was rescheduled for. Because of the holidays, courts close for a month in the middle of December. We were getting closer and closer to that deadline when he finally rescheduled our hearing for December 15th. That day he heard our case for over 2 hours. When it was finally over, he told our attorney that he would not have our guardianship order and ruling complete until he returned from vacation on January 8th and that we should return home. We were devastated because we thought Zach would be staying in Uganda until M’s documents were ready for him to travel as well. Saying goodbye to M again was the hardest moment of my life.

Zach and his father returned to Uganda on January 12, 2016, four days after the judge ruled positively on our case. They then began to work on M’s passport and medical clearances as they waited for the written ruling. Eight weeks later, our written ruling was finally signed and in Zach’s hand. By that point, they had missed their visa appointment because the ruling wasn’t signed, and they had also experienced one of Uganda’s biggest presidential elections in history. M and Zach were bonding, and grew very attached to each other while Delaney and I were going crazy here at home without them!

Once Zach finally had the ruling, he was able to schedule his three appointments with the U.S. Embassy to obtain our son’s visa. The first document filing appointment went off without a hitch! Zach even said the officer was kind and from the St. Louis area! The second appointment seemed to go very well too. At this appointment, our son’s grandmother was interviewed. After this second appointment, you typically receive your Visa Exit Interview immediately as a part of the i-600 process. However, Zach was not given an appointment. We heard nothing for 2 weeks and wondered what could possibly be wrong with our case. Finally, on March 22, 2016 we received the news that our son’s visa had “delayed approval” and our case was going to be investigated by USCIS headquarters in Rome. We were blindsided and devastated. Zach had to take M back to be fostered by the children’s home directors because he had already been overseas for 11 weeks and had to come home to work. It is something that still brings tears to Zach’s eyes when he talks about it, something that he never wants to have to do again.

We were told that it would take 45 days for our case to process with USCIS in Rome and that we would then receive their decision, either an approval or a request for more evidence. We immediately hired a U.S. Immigration Attorney to walk this road with us. 45 days came and went pretty quickly and we heard nothing. Our phone calls and emails were replied with very vague answers such as, “we cannot discuss open cases.” This went on for so long that we finally got our U.S. congressman and senators involved. They tried their hardest, and they still couldn’t do anything to help. In the mean time, M was not going to school because we thought he would be coming home any day to live with us and start school here in America. We were still paying for his weekly foster care and checking in frequently. Finally on September 9, 2016 (day 163) we received USCIS’s decision. We were given a request for evidence. In this request for evidence, they gave us clear directions on how to gather the evidence in which they wanted to approve our son’s visa. We immediately got started working to obtain this evidence. Our case went back to the high courts of Uganda on November 17, 2016 to amend our original ruling and guardianship order. Just this week the judge signed our new ruling and order to name us the legal guardians of our son! At this point, we are waiting for USCIS to adjudicate and approve our son’s visa and then he will be able to come home to his forever family.

There have been many times throughout this journey that we have asked God, “why” or “can just ONE thing go right?” At times we have felt like every week it just keeps getting a little worse and we have even felt like we can’t handle much more. Yet, God has never given us more than we can handle and He is teaching us lessons on how to persevere, how to have patience, and how to stick together as a married couple. Every time we look at a picture of our son or watch a video that Zach took when he lived with him for 11 weeks, we are reminded that this fight is going to be won for our son. God has already won the battle for US and M WILL come home!

Zach: As you can see from the rest of our story, the adoption process has been a roller coaster; a roller coaster with more downs than ups sometimes!  We have tried extremely hard to not let the politics and red tape get in the way of the final goal of bringing home M. We have always told each other we will do whatever it takes to bring this little boy home.  We feel like the luckiest parents in the world to be able to give him the love, education, and life he deserves.

We would be so honored and humbled if you joined our village and supported us in the process of bringing our son home from Uganda. Whether you feel led financially or through your prayers, we would love for you to forever be a part of his story!