Hi, my name is Jim Goulart - I'm here with my wife Nancy and ten-year old daughter Sara today. This is our second year of being parishioners here at Sacred Heart. Thanks to Father Crowley and staff for allowing me to speak with you on Pentecost Sunday.

I often say that the adventure we had in order to become a family gave us enough dinner table stories to last a lifetime. Even though my wife is a wonderful cook, I'm afraid our dinner table won't accommodate you all, so I'll try to be brief and share our story with you here today. While I'll mention the Holy Spirit a time or two specifically as I speak, please try to identify the times the Holy Spirit blessed us along our journey.

In the summer of 1996, Nancy and I attended a Catholic Charities Adoption Information Night in Fairhaven. Nancy and I had been married for almost nine years. We had done no formal research on the adoption process, so we really walked in not knowing what we would hear. We knew that we were hoping to adopt a young child, an infant or a toddler, but we knew that the wait for a newborn would be long, and we had waited long enough already. We learned that there were really no toddlers in the adoption pool - if a child isn't given up at birth, then it's often that the child doesn't become available until they've gone through years of either physical and mental hardships or a long legal wait.

So we were introduced to the possibility of an international adoption - beautiful little girls from China, wonderful children in need of families in South America or Africa. Eventually we were drawn to the children in Russia, and we began the detailed process of completing a home study through Catholic Charities and working with an adoption agency that placed children from orphanages throughout Russia. We asked them to identify a little girl for us.

Three months passed, and it was January 4th, 1997 - my wife's birthday. I was home from work that day, and Nancy, a registered nurse, was working - yeah, that doesn't sound fair on her birthday, does it? Early that morning a package arrived - a little girl had been selected for us, and being the nice husband I am, I patiently waited several hours so that Nancy and I could open the package together. It contained a few photos of this precious child from a Siberian town 500 miles north of the China - Mongolia border, a brief video, and some very minimal information on her health and family history. You ask almost any adoptive parent who has experienced this and they'll tell you the same thing - that child could have been green with purple spots, but she'd still be perfect in your eyes. There were reasons to be concerned - this child, named Oksana (Sara is now Sara Mae Oksana), was born premature, and she had been in serious condition and treated with antibiotics for weeks after her birth. Yet there was no way we could reject this child now. The Holy Spirit wouldn't have it that way.

It would be another five months before we boarded our flight to Russia - five months of staring at that nine-month old face in the photos and video. Ironically, it would be nine months from start-to-finish to adopt Sara. I really can't possibly go into too much detail here, but among those that the Holy Spirit guided as we traveled to the other side of the world, were:

· Our friends and family, who gave us such a wonderful baby shower and send-off
· The couple from Attleboro we met prior to our trip- amazingly, just a couple of years prior, they had traveled to this very same orphanage to adopt Lana, the very first child adopted from that facility - they've since returned and adopted a second daughter from there

· My employer, who packed two huge trunks filled with dozens and dozens of children's character slippers and sneakers, that we brought with us, as is customary to present a gift of thanks to the orphanage
· The woman who served as our host family while we stayed in Moscow during the few days prior to and following our week in the Siberian hotel - she could not do enough for us, and even sacrificed her husband by kicking him out of the apartment during our stay
· A couple from Texas we met in Siberia - they were there to adopt a four-year-old, also named Oksana - they were the only fluent English-speaking people we saw during our trip.
· I guess I should thank my Russian-English dictionary at this point as well. We wore it out.

The moment we met Sara was, and will always be, the most incredible single moment of our lives. We had been so apprehensive, especially Nancy, that Sara would be afraid, would shy away from us. Nancy had brought a tiny doll with her. While the orphanage staff was dining with us (we were told Sara was napping), suddenly the door opened and an orphanage worker appeared. She was holding that little person we had stared at for five months, wondering how she was, what she was doing. Sara could not extend her arms quickly enough to reach for her new doll. Her mom, my wife, accepted her, and cradled her, held her. She played with me, the only man she had ever seen other than the orphanage director. While the formalities of the adoption, including appearing before a Siberian judge and the paperwork process back in Moscow at the embassy, was still ahead of us, there was no doubt. We finally had our little girl. The date was June 4th, 1997 - did you happen to notice today's date? Adoptive kids get to celebrate not only birthday's but also "Gotcha day's". It's called that because that's the day we "gotcha", right Sara?

We received a tour of the orphanage - at least those parts the staff wanted to show off. These workers, with so little, did what they could. Approximately 100 children, all three years and under, lived there. We saw about two dozen children that day. It seemed only our Sara, calling out for us - we had to place her down in a large playpen for our tour - seemed to be full of life. Somehow she knew it was her special day. She was telling God that we were her parents because she asked God for us, she now says.

We accompanied the couple from Texas to a different orphanage where they picked up their four-year-old daughter. In what was the most sobering moment of the trip, we watched as perhaps 20 of this little girl's "classmates", if you will, lined up on the front porch, dressed in their finest clothes, all the girls with big bows in their hair. They all waved as the newly-formed family got in their car and drove away. What must have been going through the minds of those children who somehow weren't chosen, at least on that day.

We survived a frightful domestic Russian flight from Siberia to Moscow, and made our way home a few days later. The celebrations began, and we had our few weeks of bliss, as we call them. We decked Sara out in the finest red, white, and blue for the 4th of July.

We had been home about five or six weeks when we made a discovery. I mentioned to Nancy that Sara didn't seem to react to our voices when we first entered a room. We tested her by clanging a pot right behind her head. Sure enough, no reaction. Tests soon confirmed severe hearing loss in both ears. Sara was deaf. More tears, more worry, more anxiety, again about something we knew nothing about.

Now, almost nine years later, Sara is a 4th grader at the Learning Center for Deaf Children in Randolph, just a wonderful elementary school. She's on grade level and just took her MCAS tests as any other 4th grader would. She's an accomplished artist and has had her artwork displayed at the Fall River Art Association. Considering the non-artistic tendencies of Nancy and I, we consider her art her special Russian gift. Sara's a tremendous athlete and played on her school's jayvee basketball team as one of its youngest participants ever.

We count amongst our best friends Sara's educators, speech therapists, audiologists, our sign language instructors, and so many others. Through Sara, we've been blessed with two circles of friends that we otherwise would never had known - fellow adoptive parents and the folks in the deaf community, including the wonderful ladies who interpret your 9:30 mass, Judy here today, Theresa, Marie, and Tracy. That's why we worship here each week, coming from our home in Assonet. Thank you so much.

Finally, and this is important, just to prove to you that you can always overcome obstacles with God's help and guidance, I have a form here that we were asked to fill out at the beginning of the adoption process. It lists 42 potential disabilities and/or issues, and for each one, Nancy and I needed to check off either "can accept", "willing to discuss", or "cannot accept". This was an excruciating form to fill out, and we thoroughly looked into our hearts and discussed each line item one by one. Somehow God had faith we could accept and nurture a deaf child, even if this form says we didn't think we could.

If Sara had remained in Russia, she likely would have been mis-diagnosed and placed in an asylum rather than in various orphanages. She truly hit the jackpot, although Nancy and I consider ourselves to be the real lottery winners.

Our family has been blessed by God - thank you for listening to our story.