"My husband and I adopted one of the first HIV+ children from Ethiopia back in 2006. At that time there was no support and no help for families adopting HIV+ children internationally and the I601 waiver paperwork was taking 2 to 6 months to be completed. In 2007 I worked with Carolyn and Leslie to start Project HOPEFUL, and with the help of MacLane Layton we were able to get the waiver process routinely expedited so that it is now taking just 10 business days in most cases.

I was hired to be the adoption coordinator for HIV+ children for Adoption Advocates International in January of 2008. Since that time I have continued to work closely with Project HOPEFUL and they have helped many of our adoptive families when there were children that were urgently sick and when waiver paperwork ran into unexpected delays. When we adopted our son, Tsega, (who is HIV+) from Ethiopia in March of 2008, we had a much faster timeline thanks to the changes in the waiver processing Project HOPEFUL was able to have made.

Project HOPEFUL is a wonderful safety net for our families adopting HIV+ children. It is a great comfort for families to know that there is somewhere to turn if they run into delays in bringing their child home, or in an emergency."