Carol and I got married in 1980 after 5 years of dating/engagement. We met in church and were committed to the purity that the Lord asks of his people so sexuality didn't happen until we were 23. We had both finished college. Carol was working as an engineer for South Central Bell and I had begun my first year in seminary. A child wasn't economically feasible, so Carol was on the pill.
I don't remember when we decided to stop the pill and begin to try to get pregnant. It was somewhere after the first year. Carol had often had problems with her cycle so we were greeted many times with the possibility of pregnancy with accompanying disappointment. After a couple of years, we began the investigation process. Carol went through a number of procedures. I was tested. We tried a number of things, including fertility drugs, but there were no results. We did not feel good about where "test tube" solutions were in those days, so we accepted (albeit painfully) that we would apparently be childless.
Occasionally adoption talk would enter the picture when someone mentioned a child that needed a home. We became very aware of these situations as our church adopted a Florida Baptist Children's Home residence and Carol and I "adopted" one of the children there. Still, nothing ever clicked.
In 1989 we began a process that led to us being appointed as missionaries with the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention to the country of Angola. My job would be to establish a school for training pastors using the national language, Portuguese. In November 1990, we moved to Portugal to learn the language. 15 months later, we arrived in Luanda. During the next 11 months, we would experience danger, our lives being directly threatened in a variety of ways. It made sense to us, that it was far easier to endure without the additional fear for kids.
Carol always had a child nurture side. Even as a teenager, she had worked in the nursery of our church. Later, she had taught children's Sunday School. Once we were leading our own church, she became the primary leader for all things children: Bible instruction, music, missions. In Angola, she taught the children's Sunday School class in our local church, training teenagers in how to do it. (One of them went on to advanced degrees and is a denominational expert on Sunday School.) In Kenya, we were assigned to the theological college and she excelled in working with seminary students, but her heart was always with children. For example, we went up to the western area of Kenya for me to lead a conference in a church, along with one of our Kenyan professors. On the first day, she noticed that children were running everywhere in this little village. She asked the pastor "who works with the children." They had no program of any kind. She asked if they had space where she could work with them while we completed the multi-day conference. The man closest to the church, not a church member, allowed them to meet in his enclosure. Later that year, the pastor returned for a seminar at the school. He told how the church had embraced what Carol had done and opened the "Carol Minshew Bible School for children". With missionary kids, Aunt Carol was always doing things to make them feel special. In Namibia, that included special tee shirts for mission meetings, individually designed for each child.
After four years of serving in Namibia, we returned for furlough in the United States in 1998-99. We were cared for by Kirby Woods Baptist Church who rented an apartment for us. Kirby Woods had become partners with us and sent teams to work in Namibia. It was special to go to church with people who knew what we did because they had been there. We lived close to the church which made it easy to be involved in the normal things of the church when we weren't traveling to fulfill mission's responsibilities.
Early in January 1999, we had left the Wednesday fellowship dinner and were walking slowly through the hallway to go to prayer meeting. On a bulletin board were the pictures of two little girls and the question, "Wouldn't you want to be the parent for these two?" A lady who had just returned from adopting a little girl in Bulgaria had posted the pictures - two little girls that were in the orphanage with her adopted daughter. I asked Carol, "You haven't thought about something like this, have you?" She said, "As a matter of fact, that lady spoke to the women's retreat in December and I haven't been able to think about much since then." I was surprised since she had said nothing about it. I said, "If we were to do something like this, you would need to be in front. If I'm in front, and you start to feel like we shouldn't do it, I won't hear you. I'll be driven by the goal."
The next morning, I went to doctoral studies. When I got back that afternoon, she had called the agency, got information about the process, and sent them a check for $2000.00. I said, "I guess you are out front." She said, "I guess I am"...and there was a good bit of "so there" tone in her reply.
A short time later, the agency called her and recommended that we follow through with Bulgaria since we could identify the child upfront...and added, "we have four children for immediate adoption. Would you want to discuss them?" Carol said she threw a prayer into heaven: Lord, I'm saying no to three if I say yes to one. If there is a child we should be involved with, let the name have some significance and let the birthday have some meaning. First three? Too old to be able to adapt to missionary life or no harmony with her prayer. Last one? His name was Denis. The pastor who baptized Carol, who preached my ordination, who performed our wedding was Dennis Montgomery Renick. Then, his birthday. July 25. Our anniversary. Within a week, we had video and pictures and started our process.
The adoption process is multifaceted. It begins with documents and qualifications and homestudies. We found the perfect person to help us with the home study. She was from a family that had had multiple generations of missionaries and understood the dynamics of missionary families on the field. She was dealing with some extreme needs within her own family and we were active in traveling to promote the work of Southern Baptist missions, so we kept running into great difficulty in completing all of the tasks that were necessary for the home study. That meant, that we were delayed in getting our documents prepared and sent off to Bulgaria. The translations were done and the documents finally sent during the last week of July. They arrived in Bulgaria the first week of August. Problem! The government of Bulgaria takes off all of August for vacation and so our documents would not be acted on until September.
We had returned to Namibia in August, thinking that all was well and that it would just be a matter of waiting for the processes to complete themselves. We were informed by the agency to be prepared for a 9 to 12-month wait. Suddenly, in September they indicated that we would need to process our police checks again since their estimate was that the police check part of our documents would be out of date when the government examined them. Communications were difficult in those days compared to today. Still, I called directly to the sheriff's Office in Memphis Tennessee and explained our dilemma. I was directed to a relatively senior official. She told me that we would have to present ourselves in person in order to process the documents again. We begin to pray asking friends and family to pray. Then, I realized that Carol's mother held our power of attorney and should be able, based on that document, to process the documents. I called and asked her to speak to the sheriff's Office. When she called that senior official again, she said oh, about the time that we hung up, I realized it was no reason we couldn't do that so you can come to pick up the documents. They're waiting on you." Relief!
The most hilarious part is that the update wasn't necessary. Our documents arrived in the first government ministry on September 5. The process required the documents to pass through three government ministries and the courts, a process that normally required 9 months to a year. Instead, the court acted on our application on November 15 with the provision that it would be final if there was no objection by November 25. How did our application go through so quickly? The speculation of our agency was my crazy last name: Minshew. Turned into Cyrillic script, it becomes Minshev. Mincho Minchev is one of the most famous Bulgarian musicians. "From 1977 he has played a 1716 Stradivarius Baron Wittgenstein instrument, purchased especially for him by the Bulgarian government. He is the holder of the Musician of the Year 1993 Annual Prize of the Bulgarian National Radio and of the Prize for exceptional contribution to Bulgarian culture." So, our agency concluded that the application would arrive on a disk and that the official would conclude that a person of Bulgarian descent was adopting a Bulgarian orphan.
This created some immediate tension. First, the adoption agency would not be operational in Bulgaria through the holidays. We began to process applications to bring Dennis to Namibia when we went to get him. We had permission to enter the United States, but we wanted to have time to become a family before we brought him the big pass-around party in the US. We waited and waited. I finally said to Carol, "I don't think we should let Namibia be who determines when we get our son'! We used a travel agency in Windhoek, the capital city, to book our flight through Austrian Airlines. We explained the complexity to the agent. She appealed to the airline and they granted us, upfront, one free re-book. We could cancel our return flight and set another date...once. Otherwise, we would have to pay for another ticket.
It was a blessing that during the furlough where we processed our paperwork, we had come to know Roger and Janice Capps well. The Capps were missionaries we had met in a previous furlough while they were serving in Singapore. We did not know that they had transferred to Bulgaria. They prayed with us and for us during that furlough. Then, they welcomed us to stay with them when things happened. They were a tremendous blessing!
We arrived in Sofia on February 27 with the plan to go up and get Dennis on February 28. Soon, the agency let us know there was an issue with that day. It was only on February 29 that we were able to travel from Sofia to the city of Montana. Probably the funniest thing from that trip was cultural. I told the agency liaison, Doc, that Carol really needed to have something to eat. He acted like he didn't hear me. I finally said it more forcefully. In an agonized tone, he said, "there is no American foot up here. There is no Pizza Hut!" He was shocked that we ordered Bulgarian food and ate it with enjoyment.
We were finally there. We met with the director and got information. Then, we were led back to meet Dennis. We both got to hold him. A picture I've often shared on Facebook was my first hold.
Afterward, Carol took him back and changed him into the clothes we brought. That was part of the deal! We got him only as he had come into the world.
