Mission Statement #1 concerning International Adoption

In his civilian life, my husband works in a large municipal social service department so I'm always hearing or seeing the various "MISSION STATEMENTS" of various local and state agencies, and private service providers. Everyone seems to have a mission statement nowadays, and I wouldn't want to be left out of the herd. I couldn't think of one good statement to encompass everything I hope to cover on the blog, so I'll have to come up with a lot of them. Being an inter-disciplinary blog (I hope none of the scary people from over at Discarded Lies visit and catch that term- they might leave comments that aren't family friendly) obviously has its drawbacks.

I'm a part of the "international adoption community". These days, you'd think that was quite an exclusive group, what with celebrities like Madonna and Angeline Jolie being part of the club. But it's really not. Anyone willing to have their home and privacy invaded by a social worker, to turn over years worth of their financial records, to have their fingerprints run by the FBI, and who can put out a substantial amount of cash can belong to the international adoption community. We've done all these things, and this resulted in one successful adoption from China. We brought our daughter home last January. WARNING: using the term "home" in relation to adoption can be a very controversial thing. I'll discuss why this is so and how I learned it in the future. For now, if you're interested in seeing my less than stellar attempt to blog about our adoption, see the link on the side- something about Mad in China.

Right now, we're smack dab in the middle of an adoption from Kazakhstan. Yes, Kazakhstan is a real place. No, I don't find Borat funny. If Mr. Cohen had cajones he'd make fun of a country that's really dangerous to ridicule, like Iran or Saudi Arabia. Some people would add the United States, but since people have been busting on us since the Revolution, it's overdone. I also don't find the commentators on VH1 funny when they ragged on Kazakhstan as a country "no one would want to adopt from" as a segue between the Madonna Malawai story and a piece about the Borat movie. But I digress...

We're smack dab in the middle of a Kazakhstan adoption. Our paperwork is currently sitting on a desk in a government office over there, waiting for someone to approve us, or send a letter back to our agency saying, "What were you people thinking sending us this? These people are crazy and we're not letting them adopt one of our kids. A great big NYET to this dossier." If we were rich (in the financial sense) we'd adopt many more children, but I think this is it. After the approval, we get invited to the country, get visas, leave the children currently a part of our family membership with friends, and go off to Kazakhstan for three to four weeks.

So I need a mission statement for the International Adoption portion of the blog. How's this for starters: "Our mission at Reserve Wife is to further the understanding and acceptance of international adoption among the members of the blogosphere, and to facilitate the dissemination of knowledge on this and related issues."

Okay, that's not very good, so we're taking suggestions in the comments.