Choosing an Agency

We have been struggling with this decision for the last two months. As we started researching and looking into various agencies, we were amazed with the amount that we could select from. We never thought that it would be such a difficult process.
We narrowed our search down to four agencies and from there discussed what our priorities that should be found within the agency. We both felt strongly that there should be some form of in country support provided for the orphans. This may look like medical care or educational opportunities, or maybe even something entirely different. We just want to know that things are in place for the orphans that are there temporarily and for those that stay much longer than anticipated.
We quickly removed one agency from our list after reading about various problems they were having with regulations and following through in a professional manner. We then removed another agency from our list when we discovered how the amount of money to process the adoption is significantly larger than other agencies.
So here we are narrowed down to two agencies and we had the hardest time deciding. We created a long list of questions we had for the agency. We had then called and interviewed someone at both agencies. We also read blogs, joined web-groups, and checked out financial records. Finally, we took an evening and sat down to shift through all of the information we had gathered. As we were looking at all of the paper work, it became very obvious that one agency would provide a lot of what we were looking for. We still had a few follow up questions, which we called and had answered the next day, but once all was said and done we made our decision. We will be working with Holt International for the Ethiopia part and Wyoming Children's Society for our homestudy. We are happy to finally have made our decision and begin to move forward!