Why Kazakhstan?

This is a question we hear frequently enough and we will still need to answer it many more times throughout our journey so I figured I should go ahead and share this with all of our loyal readers (we like to think of y’all as our fan club;)

As our friends and family all know John and I met at Hancock Field Station as outdoor science field instructors. John’s family was blown away that he finally met the girl of his dreams on the river of all places. While working there, HFS had is 50th anniversary and many people were invited from all over the country and especially Oregon. John was in charge of running the lapidary saws and while polishing a piece of goose rock, a man named Larry McGraw (whose uncle founded the field station) looked over his shoulder and asked John if he would make his grave marker out of that rock. This got John's attention and the next thing we knew we were sitting down learning about this man’s life and drinking some of his homemade apple cider.

Over time we became good friends with Larry and we began to visit him at his orchard on the weekends. His orchard was an enchanted garden with 450 varieties of apples, 70 types of pears, 40 species of plums, and some grapevines and apricots thrown in the mix. As our friendship with Larry developed he taught us more and more about apples, and herein lies the first time we ever heard of the country of Kazakhstan. During the cold war Larry had contacted orchardist from Kazakhstan to get root and grafting stock and many of his trees that we still look after, have a common roots with our future child(ren)’s heritage.

When we started to research countries to adopt from, Kazakhstan made our top four because of Larry and his desire to go there and meet the wonderful people who sent him roots and to see the wild apple forest. Then we learned how well they care for their children, we learned that they have baby houses, not orphanages. We learned that they live in small groups and that they have consistent loving care takers, and massage and physical therapy and most of all our hearts screamed to us that our child(ren) are there and we must go to them. While we had the opportunity to do this much easier, there are some things in life that are difficult and they are still the right thing to do.

It has been a long journey and our friend Larry has since passed away, yet his trees live on and flourish with their roots from Kazakhstan and nurturing from here. It is our desire that we can show and share with the people of Grant County and all of our other friends around the world, not only Kazakhstan apples, but the children we will be granted the honor of calling our own.