By Gracie Fairfax | Echo
Three young Ugandan girls jumping around in the snow may not be a typical sight in Matthews, Ind. But for the McKim family, this was a day they had waited for years to see.
Jen McKim, the new office assistant at Taylor University Press, dreamed of adopting ever since she was in junior high. It wasn't until McKim was pregnant with her third son that she began doing some research and praying about adoption.
"I don't know why I started thinking of Uganda," McKim said. "I had never known anyone from there, I had never been there, but I just really had a heart for Uganda. A couple of months into our process, our agency called and said, 'Hey, Uganda is wanting to start up a pilot adoption program for people outside of Uganda. Would you guys be willing to be a pilot family for their programs?'"
The agency sent them a package with 12 or 13 pictures of children who had been found in a rock quarry.
"Our agency's social worker in Uganda had found this rock quarry outside of the capital city of Kampala," McKim said. "There were just hundreds of people working and living in this rock quarry. There were all of these children just sitting on top of all these piles of rocks with makeshift hammers kind of just beating big boulders into little tiny stones."
At that point, they took their cares to the Lord as they made the difficult decision about how many children they would adopt. After considering how many children they could realistically support, they hit the final number of three.
Over the four-year adoption process, McKim visited Uganda four times. After about two-and-a-half years, the McKim family received guardianship over three little girls.
But yet again, their faith was tested.
"I was with them in the hotel room. . . . (We) had all their bags packed to come home to America, and the embassy called and said they had been investigating our Ugandan social worker, and they had found out that all the paperwork he had submitted was fraudulent," McKim said.
Consequently, the McKims weren't able to get visas for the girls, and the girls couldn't go back to a foster home, because they now had parents. In order to continue normal life with their three kids in the States while still fighting for the adoption, the family rented an apartment in Uganda and hired live-in nannies to care for their daughters, all while they were living in America.
"So essentially, we had to start over with everything and go through the process again," McKim said.
They thought about giving up several times. Living on a schoolteacher's salary while trying to support three kids and continuing the adoption process became a burden both emotionally and financially.
"We had fallen in love with the girls already, and I had lived with them for a summer," McKim said. "They called me Mom. At that point, they're our children. . . No matter what, it was just going to be like 'Okay, we can't give up on them.'"
Her experience spurred McKim to help start a nonprofit organization to assist female quarry-workers.This organization led her to discover the birth mothers of the girls they were hoping to adopt.
"We were told that they were full orphans; we didn't even know that they had families-and I'm so glad it happened this way, or we would not have found that out. . . .I would've been devastated to know that they had birth families who didn't even know what was going on at the time," McKim said.
The McKims were determined to finish the adoption. They decided to educate the birth mothers on adoption and hired a lawyer to talk about the adoption process with them. Above all, they earned the mothers' trust, which ultimately resulted in the mothers' consent.
Back on the home front in Matthews, the community rallied around the family as they dealt with the highs and lows of the process. When they initially received guardianship of the girls, the students at Eastbrook North Elementary secretly put together a penny drive to raise money for the family-coming out of it with a couple thousand dollars.
"At this point, everyone was so invested in the story and the girls without even knowing them," McKim said. "Who's ever heard of a small little public school raising money for an adoption?"
When the long-awaited day came for McKim to pick up the girls from Uganda, the teachers at Eastbrook sent along binders for the girls with pictures of their classmates and classrooms to give them a glimpse of the life that awaited them.
"We had this whole army of people behind us, supporting us along the way just wanting to be a part of it. It was really great," McKim said.
The day came for the girls to come home-this time it was real. Their sun-kissed skin met the snow as they squealed with joy.
It was December 21. They were just in time for Christmas.
Almost four years later, as they enjoy life in the states with their new family, the McKims have gained a deeper understanding of what it means to wait on the Lord.
