My wife (SO) and I have always loved kids and before we got married we knew we wanted to have some. I always told people I was going to have 3 children, 1 boy, 1 girl, and 1 we weren’t too sure about. Okay that was probably funnier in my head, but I really did tell my friends that.
Anyway, with both of us wanting kids we decided to try. Didn’t see that coming did you? Oh, you did? Well, just forget I said that then.
After years of trying and then going through the normal ways of conceiving and getting help to conceive, we still had no little rugrats to call our own. I’m not going to expand on these attempts here, maybe another time.
We never gave up, but with our 10th wedding anniversary approaching it was pretty obvious that we weren’t going to have any of our own kids.
Adoption had been discussed and we were okay with that and had made some inquiries about it and were actively talking to organisations to help us do that. Actually, okay is probably an understatement, we were very happy to do that and were very positive about going down that road.
With SO being Indonesian, and with both of us living in Indonesia since our marriage (we moved to Indonesia 1 month after the wedding) we were naturally looking to adopt an Indonesian baby. Unfortunately we hadn’t been fortunate enough to find one that we could adopt.
For those not aware there are several regulations regarding who can adopt what child. Being a foreigner I had to have been living in Indonesia for a set period of time, which luckily I had done so by this time. The main factor that was hindering us though, was that, as non-Muslims, we couldn’t adopt a Muslim child. If a child’s parents were unknown, then the child is assumed to be Muslim. They are the majority religion after all, so it kind of make sense.
The result was that, after contacting several orphanages, we had been unable to locate a child we could adopt.
Anyway, we were planning on going for a holiday in Indonesia to celebrate our 10th anniversary, and had narrowed our choices down to Bali or Yogyakarta, since I had never been to either. Almost 8 years later and I still haven’t been to Bali, go figure.
Every time we plan to go to Bali something happens, terrorist attackes, tropical storms, or some other thing causing us to call off plans. And this time was no different, tropical storms were coming in and we didn’t want to get stuck in the middle of one. So we did the obvious and decided to holiday near an active volcano. Okay it wasn’t really active at the time but there’s always the chance that it could go off unexpectedly.
So we went on holiday, putting our desire for children on the back burner for a while. We got a local driver through the travel agent and started our trip in Solo, travelling through the countryside and visiting places of note such as the Dieng Plateau and Borobudur on our way to Yogyakarta. Oh and eating tons of the local food. Indonesian food is the reason I’ve put on over 10 kgs (22 pounds for those stuck in the last century) since we got married.
During our travels we had gotten to know our driver quite well and spent a lot of time talking to him as we travelled from place to place, and happened to mention to him that we were interested in adopting a child. It turned out that he had actually adopted his daughter from a Catholic hospital in Yogyakarta, and asked if we’d be interested in visiting it.
Of course we said yes. There was no guarantee there would be any children available there but we went to talk to the nuns who ran the place with the hope that they might locate a child sometime.
As it turned out though, a couple of hours before we arrived a girl had come in, almost 9 months pregnant, who wanted to give her baby up for adoption once it was born. Of course we still had to be interviewed by the nuns to determine if we would be suitable and they would allow us to adopt the baby. As a stroke of luck it turned out that the head nun had worked with SO’s brother (he’s a Doctor) in a hospital in another city 4 hours away. As a result we ended up getting the approval and left Yogyakarta to return to the daily grind and awaiting the call to say the baby (that they told us was a girl) had arrived.
The baby was due 2 weeks after we first visited the hospital, but as fate would have it he was a week early and arrived 1 week after we returned. The next few days were spent rushing around and getting things ready and 5 days after he was born we arrived in Yogyakarta to finalise the adoption (which actually took 2 months to complete) and bring him home.
There’s more to the story than this, but i think I’ll leave that for another time.