Adoption of a Burned Child

About 5 year ago, We found out the fertility treatments were not working. Which I was surprisingly OK with for many reasons. The treatments required me to give her injections daily. Not a fan of that at all. And at one point I ended up taking her to the hospital due to pain caused by the treatments. So, we decided we would adopt. By this time, we were very anxious for a child. We decided we would adopt. We went to an adoption agency and found out it would take a about 2 years and 25K to adopt. I didn't have 25K laying around, but surprisingly we still went through with it. We ended up taking some loans and managed to scrape together the money.

We did research and found that the adoption agency had a list of special needs kids. We looked through the list, and saw a little boy who had been burned in a fire. We figured we could deal with the burn issues and decided to apply to adopt the child. We continued to research the child looking for any little bits we could find. As best as we could find,  the child's family was living in a shack under a freeway with no electricity. Lighting was provided by oil lamps, little house on the prairie style. Anyways, the father came home on Christmas night drunk and angry at the wife.  They got into a huge argument and in a fit of rage the husband through an oil lamp against the wall. The shack immediately went up in flames. I am not sure what happened next, but someone.... finally managed to get the one year old child out of the house, but not before he suffered major burns.

The parents of the child were in fear, because police and fire were on the way. The police was the biggest problem as the neighborhood of shacks under the freeway was burning to the ground. The next door shack had burned with a lady and her daughter inside. The couple knew they were in trouble. They ran the only place they could, down to a local orphanage that also served as an outreach program to the neighborhood. They left the child and fled before police could arrive.

The caregivers saw the state of the child and immediately rushed him to the hospital. At the hospital, four hour into the wait for care it was clear none was coming for this parentless child. The caregivers took the child back to the orphanage and were forced to deal with the burns the they could. They treated the burns with what they had, but this meant no anesthetic. It was very painful for the child and at one point during the night he stopped breathing. The managed to get the child breathing again and watched him the many days until he recovered.

The parents of the child, the mother, did return to the orphanage. She did not ask to see the child, but was simply there to beg for food and supplies. The grandmother occasionally visited and whispered into the child's ear that he no longer had a mommy and daddy. Finally the lady in charge of the orphanage had enough, and decided to try to get the parents to sign the child away. The reluctantly signed him away. He continues to live in the orphanage until age 3 and a half. We adopted him in April 2008.