When Rachel Whitmire was a teenager, she read a book about adoption called The Family Nobody Wanted, which was about adopting children who were harder to place, either because of race or special needs. The book made an impact on Rachel and she knew she wanted to adopt children, although she hadn’t specifically committed to adopting special-needs children.
After Rachel got married, she figured she would have biological children first and then add to their family through adoption. A medical condition made pregnancy difficult, so she and her husband Scott had their adoption dream come true sooner than they expected.
They were in the process of their first adoption when they received some devastating news: their child Erick had passed away. Another child, Jayden, joined their family as a two-year-old. Rachel felt pulled to adopt a child from Liberia and discovered an orphanage with hearing-impaired children. She received an email with four pictures of deaf children.
“I opened the pictures to look at them and was just captivated by this one little girl,” said Rachel. “She was dressed in a ragged pink dress and had the most beautiful smile. It was like sunshine! She was five years old and had been in the orphanage for several years. Her name was Lillian.”
Her husband took one look at the picture and told Rachel, “That’s our daughter!”
Adopting Hearing-Impaired Children
The adoption process was a long one. “While we waited, we really dedicated ourselves to getting ready to adopt a deaf child,” said Rachel. “We wanted to be able to communicate with our daughter and give her everything that she needed to be successful. We also wanted her to be proud of being deaf and to have deaf role models to look up to.”
The Whitmires took sign classes and moved to Dallas to be closer to more resources—churches with interpreters, a larger deaf community and more deaf events. Armed with an American Sign Language dictionary, Rachel took off for Liberia and brought Lillian home. Around the same time, another son, Micah, joined the family.
Lillian Joins the Family
“The first 24 hours were hard, because she was so scared and didn’t understand what was happening to her,” Rachel explained. “No one had bothered to tell her that I was coming to get her!”
The first day, Rachel found herself a bit lost as how to communicate with Lillian. Slowly but surely, they began to connect with one another. Conversing in sign became easier as Lillian’s vocabulary expanded.
“Lillian has been such an amazing blessing to us; I am so glad that we stepped out in faith and adopted her,” Rachel shared. “We are so thrilled to have her in our family and she has brought so much to our family. Her deafness is a plus, not a minus. We have met new people, learned new things, and been exposed to an amazing culture because of her deafness. It has been a good thing for all of us.”
For more information on adopting deaf and hard-of-hearing children, check out:
-DeafHOH Adoption
