Anna Dombkins

And there were some journalists who wore hidden cameras and went into these orphanages and they'd heard that there was a dying room where they just left a child to die.

And so they wanted to go in and see if this was the case and they took these hidden cameras in and we just sat on the lounge watching this and it just broke our hearts.

There was just rows and rows of babies who were never held responsible

tied to these little bamboo chairs and rocking back and forth and then there was this room where they had a child that was just left alone to die and it just shook us to the core and I think in part because we had our first baby at that time, Jackson was about six months old and he was sitting there right in front of us and the contrast between what we were seeing and what our child had was just extraordinary and so it was just one of those moments that completely changed our lives.

Yeah, it was right at that moment that I think our idea for our family changed.

We'd been in that zone where you're a new family and you're thinking about what do we want for our family?

And our faith was a big part of that in terms of thinking about, well, how does what we believe impact the choices we make as a family?

And we'd all heard, you know, the horror stories about people who...

do terrible things in the name of faith or of God that they don't really know.

But to us, that was a big part of our lives.

And so we wanted our family to reflect our faith.

And so we decided at that moment that we would grow our family in part through adoption.

We were kind of naively went into it thinking this was going to be a simple process where they just matched, you know, parentless children with stable families and it would all be easy and it was not at all.

And so we spent about four years in that process.

Yeah, they wouldn't allow you to be pregnant and in the process.

So they very much had a view that you shouldn't mix biological and adopted children because they wouldn't get along and it would damage the biological children.

And so we kind of fought that back and forth and they said they wouldn't approve us to be adoptive parents unless we agreed not to have any more biological children and even suggested I had my tubes tied to show our commitment to adoption.

And that's not what we wanted for our family.

We did want a mix of biological and adopted children and we didn't want to kind of stop one or the other.

And so two children, Jackson was then four and our daughter, Jemima, was about one.