Right now, my heart is on the other side of the world.

You see, my life is about to change. I’m about to become a mother, but not in the traditional way. In June, after my husband and I had been on two different lists to adopt an infant domestically, we visited a program here in Alabama called Bridges of Faith. And we fell in love with a girl named Nastia.

BOF is a non-denominational Christian organization that brings orphaned children from Ukraine to Alabama for a cultural experience here in America and to teach them about Jesus. Mostly, the volunteers spend time with the kids, take them on fun outings, and show them love and affection. Although BOF is not an adoption agency, about 80 percent of the children are adopted through their visits to the United States.

For many years, my husband and I wanted children. But it hasn’t been that easy for us. I know many of you reading this have had the same experiences. Peeing on sticks is not fun. Fertility testing, as many of you know, is embarrassing and expensive. And we weren’t getting anywhere with it.

I am approaching 40 and it seemed the next step was IVF. I was not jazzed about it. My husband really wasn’t jazzed about it. He wasn’t really excited about my being pregnant at this point anyway. What if I had a stroke, a blood clot, had to be on bed rest? Since I am the main wage earner in our family, he worried about how we would make it. He worried about my being sick. He’s a worrier.

So we started looking at adoption. At first, I wanted a baby. I love babies! They are so cute and cuddly, and I just love them. But the wait times are long, and we were getting frustrated. We started thinking about older children. There are so many of them who need love, and seem to be overlooked, forgotten.

A very good friend of ours went on a mission trip with BOF to Ukraine in March. She is a reporter for the newspaper here in Montgomery. We’ve known her for years, and she was excited to tell us of the wonderful work they did with the kids. They were bringing a group in May, and wouldn’t we like to come and meet them?

Finally, June came and we got the chance to meet the kids and the founder of the organization, Tom Benz. When Dave and I got there, we discovered that the kids there were considerably older than what we were looking for. We were a little disappointed. But Tom said to stay, talk to the kids and, “See what we’re all about.”

So we did. And that night, I met my daughter.

Nastia is a 15-year-old orphan from Ukraine. She has dark hair and dark eyes that I can tell are always analyzing every situation. She loves art and photography. She loves sports. She cannot speak English yet, but she does speak Ukrainian, Russian, Italian and a little Spanish.

She fights for the underdog. Literally. Her cousin, who was adopted by a couple in our area two years ago, told us that some boys killed a dog in the street once. Nastia found out about it and beat up the boys. God, I love that girl.

We did not plan to adopt an older child. But she is whom we connected with, whom we fell in love with. Nastia is one of 147 million orphans around the world. Now, she will be one less.

In the Ukraine, when children in the orphanage reach 18, they “graduate,” hopefully to a job. But the statistics, especially for girls, are sad. Sixty percent end up prostitutes or in the sex trade, and 10 percent commit suicide.

The first night we met Nastia, short for Anastasia, we knew there was something special about her. My husband David and I talked about her the whole way home that night.

The second night we were there, we found out she had a cousin, also named Nastia, who had been adopted two years ago, with another teenager named Nadia, and lived 20 minutes away from us. We were able to talk to her cousin’s parents, and got the lowdown on the process. That was only the beginning. When we left, our Nastia hopped up to hug us goodbye. Knowing I wouldn’t see her for a few days, I cried all the way home.

That’s when I really knew. And that’s when we made the call. We wanted to make her our daughter.

Over the three weeks we spent with kids at the Bridges of Faith camp known as Bridgestone, we went on outings with them, ate dinner with them, even served as house parents for a night. We got to know, not only Nastia, but all of the children.

There are things these kids have been through that would break most American children. Stories of abuse and abandonment, life in a somewhat godless society, life where they have to fend for themselves – stories that I cannot repeat here.

We hear stories of this in the foster system here in the United States, but many of these children live in orphanages of 150 children or more, with no adult supervision. That these kids still found joy in the simplest things and were thankful to us for our time and love was amazing to me.

We fell in love with not only Nastia, but with all of the children. Costya, Sasha, Dima, Yura, Lena, Maxim, and Misha are all amazing kids. They were just dealt a really bad hand in life.

An international adoption requires you to kill more trees than a small forest. Sorry all you environmentalists, we’ve tried to email and scan as much as we could, but it’s just not possible.

There is the home study and the background checks by – in our case – no less than seven government agencies, including the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and Interpol. You have to compile a dossier of documents, which all must be notarized and then apostilled. An apostille is basically a document from the Secretary of State of that state saying that the notary is valid. You have to have one for every document.

Currently we are waiting for immigration to process our paperwork to officially submit everything to the agency in Ukraine. Then, they have to process that and we get a court date in Ukraine! It is our hope we get a date before the end of the year!

I constantly check my email for updates from our lawyer in Ukraine. I always have my ear out for alerts from my VK account (that’s basically Facebook in Eastern Europe) in case Nastia sends me a message. When you are an adoptive parent, and your child is on the other side of the world, you hang on to every last bit of communication. Every word, every smiley emoticon, and every heart that gets texted.

So, that is why my heart is on the other side of the world. As Tom Petty once said, “The waiting is the hardest part.” Hopefully, it won’t be too much longer.

Check out our blog at: http://love4nastia.wordpress.com/

Dr. Bundy is an emergency physician with the Baptist Health System in Montgomery, Ala., and a former photojournalist, who not only sings in the car, but talks to herself, is addicted to diet drinks and shoes, and thinks emergency medicine is the greatest specialty.