Our adoption journey began in April of 2003 on a clear Sunday morning when I heard a message about the plight of children overseas. It was not about the orphans per se but my heart leaped and a seed of hope was planted as I began to pray for God’s direction. While I heard a loud knock from God, my husband did not. For almost a year and half, I prayed and trusted that God will make our paths clear for whatever He willed us to do. I am not known for my patience but God certainly taught me to wait until it was His time. I waited almost 18 months for my husband to say “okay, what’s the next step?”. It’s funny how our plans are not always God’s plan. After talking to many adoptive parents and agencies, I had convinced myself that it was Ukraine where our child lived. I finally talked my husband into going on a humanitarian mission trip so we can learn first hand the plight of the children living in orphanages. We agreed and made a commitment to travel to Donetsk, Ukraine in October, 2004 with Teresa Filmon of His Kids Too!. During the time I was praying and searching for answers, I became good friend with Ann Grabeman, founder of Until All Have Homes. She had just adopted her little girl with special needs from Russia and she was determined to find homes for other children in the orphanage where her daughter lived. She was working along side the adoption agency to find families for these children. After I inquired about her adoption experience, she told us about Lera. I can not tell you how or why or what but only by grace of God, my husband for the first time said “yes” to adoption. The timing had to be right. It had to be this little girl, our precious Lera! She was a bright eyed, very attentive little one from what we could tell. But even so, her medical diagnosis was severe and very serious. Within hours of learning about Lera, I had put an information packet and started talking to doctors, surgeons & hospital administrators to find out what we could about her diagnosis which is called arthrogryposis. Within days, we learned that our local Shriner’s hospital specialized in her medical condition. A friend, who is a former orthopedic surgeon at Mayo Clinic, gave us advice on which pediatric surgeon we should go & see. God was making things very clear to us now and in a record time! We signed our paper within days of us learning about Lera. We were still on our way to Ukraine the next week but again, our trip convinced us even more about adopting a special needs child. By the end of our trip, we were ready, determined and anxious to bring our little girl home from Russia. My first trip was only 4 weeks after our trip to Ukraine. I was barely over the jet-lag when I took the flight to Moscow! One of our good friends from Ukraine joined me in Moscow and traveled with me to Saratov. It was so nice to see a familiar face, one that I knew I could completely trust and one who spoke fluent English! It was such a blessing to have a personal translator!!! Meeting Lera the first time was a life changing experience. I can never completely explain how it is that I knew she was my child. I knew I loved her from the moment I learned about her – but when I saw her it was as though she had always been etched into my heart and my heart knew her. Seeing her physical condition that was worse than I had originally thought didn’t really matter. All I could see was a little girl who needed a family to love her unconditionally. She eventually warmed up to me, allowed me to hold her, hug her and even kiss her before I left on the first day. Second day was much better & got a lot of giggles out of her. The worst part was that I had no idea when we’d return for trip 2! We got stuck in between the holiday season then MOE temporarily stopped issuing the release letters. We were expecting an early January court date but we heard nothing until the end of Jan. that we finally had a court date on Feb. 10th and returned home on Feb. 19th, 2004! After going through all her adoption documents, we found hand written statements from Lera’s parents. Dave and I always found ourselves wondering “what would we tell Lera when she asks about the reason of why her parents gave her up?” We would conjure up all sorts of answers. We also knew her parents are married but also very young. I would often wonder if they would want to know their baby is adopted and lives in the US and if they even cared where she is. While Dave and I often wondered about those things, we never even dreamed about finding her parents. I felt they were too young to really care and from all I knew it was too expensive to locate a birth family! Then one day we received an e-mail from a fellow adoptive mom I met on a yahoo group telling us about Mary and Natasha. I wrote Mary right away to find out more about Natasha’s service and what all would involve. I was very curious but also concerned of what we would find out. I figured there are some things that are left unsaid and left to imagine for the best. Truth could hurt and reality maybe brutal. Still, we knew we had some questions we need answers for. We knew Lera would eventually ask about her birth parents. We knew it wasn’t matter of if but when. We wanted to be able to have the answers before it was too late. Natasha is an incredible person. No, we haven’t met her personally but we know through the work she has done on our behalf. She not only successfully found Lera’s parents in a remote village hours of bus ride from Saratov, but she had touched Lera’s birth family’s hearts so much so that they’ve made 2 trips to see Natasha to thank her for finding them & to give them news of Lera’s life. Natasha has been an incredible instrument, a mediator in locating Lera’s parents but also a wonderful messenger on our behalf. We are not sure how frequent or to what extent we will continue to exchange information with Lera’s birth family but we plan to do our part to keep the window of communication open for when Lera becomes interested in learning about her relatives in Russia. We have received letters and a care package thus far from Russia for Lera. We never dreamed of such positive response. We were always afraid that her families would not care of know what happened to her. We found out through Natasha that Lera has a brother who is 1 yo. I hope & pray that some day their paths will cross and will meet face to face. Thank you Mary & Natasha so much for your hard work and for your dedications. God bless you both. The Doederlein Family