Emilie Larter Fights to Bring Family from Uganda to the U.K. (Exclusive)

For the past 11 years, Emilie Larter’s been living a life she never planned for. A foreign destination became home. A workplace acquaintance turned out to be the love of her life. She became a mom and built a family before she even knew she was ready.

And mind you, Emilie did have plans when she was 22 years old. She first arrived in Uganda in 2014, intending to volunteer for a couple of months. She expected to keep moving on to neighboring countries after her time in Uganda, but much like her broader life plans, that initial visit unraveled into something much bigger.

“It was just meant to be one stop among many,” Emilie, now 33, tells PEOPLE. “My plan was to travel throughout my whole twenties and maybe have kids as late as I possibly can, in my mid to late thirties.”

She’d been volunteering at an orphanage for about two or three weeks when they received a call about an infant whose mother had died. The baby was just five days old; he didn’t even have a name yet.

Emilie went to retrieve the newborn, but a local charity director had other ideas to best address his needs. She advised that the child should be looked after in town as opposed to staying in the orphanage, which was located in a village with a higher malaria risk. She asked Emilie to care for him until he grew a bit bigger and stronger, then he could safely live at the orphanage.

“I said ‘Yes, of course,’ and I went and looked after a five-day-old baby in the town,” Emilie recalls. “And I completely fell in love.”

Her connection to the child formed naturally, easily and undeniably. She could feel her plans forking in an unexpected direction, but she was still too young to imagine the future that lay before her. Emilie emailed her dad back home in England, filling his inbox with questions: “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she would write. “How do I leave him now?”

She extended her stay in Uganda so she could continue raising the child, whom she called Adam. Though her maternal instincts were kicking in, she hadn’t started considering adoption, especially since Uganda’s rules for such a process were strict.

When Adam was seven months old, Emilie decided to come back to the United Kingdom. “I just felt like I couldn’t live in Uganda volunteering forever,” she tells PEOPLE. “But it was when I went home that I realized, well, I couldn’t leave him basically.”

She worked multiple jobs simultaneously to save up for the trip back to Uganda, where she would formally adopt Adam. At the beginning, she admits her parents were “quite skeptical” of her desire to become a mom.

“They were just a bit like, ‘I know, I’m sure he’s lovely, Emilie, but you’re not ready. You’re not set up for that,'” she remembers. “I think after they realized actually how strong the bond was, they accepted it.”

Emilie reunited with Adam in 2016, when he was nearly 2 years old. She started working at a children’s home associated with the orphanage where she previously volunteered. The organization also ran a hospital, and though Emilie had little business there, she would occasionally stop by the establishment to meet with her director.

During those visits, she got to know the head of hospital security, Josh, and they struck up a romance that brought even more unexpected love into Emilie’s life.

In September 2018, while she was entrenched in the legal process of officially adopting Adam, two of Josh’s cousins came to stay with them. Tallie and George were toddlers at the time; they weren’t in the best of health, so Emilie and Josh offered to look after them until they were in better shape.

“That was the plan, anyway,” the British native tells PEOPLE. “They ended up not going back. They just fit in the family and everything.”

Josh was able to adopt Tallie, now 9, and George, now 10, as a local adoption of family members. A year and a half later, in 2020, another young boy called James came along. Once again, their care was meant to be temporary until James’ health improved.

However, when they found out James is actually Tallie and George’s younger sibling, the now-6-year-old became a permanent part of their family.

So much of Emilie’s story follows a pattern of temporary turned permanent changes, but one thing remains unfixed: her home. Though Uganda is home in many ways — and for Josh, Tallie, George and James, it’s all they’ve ever known — the Larters always planned to settle down in the U.K.

In 2019, after Emilie’s hard-earned efforts to adopt Adam proved successful in Uganda, she started making moves to bring their family to England permanently. The U.K. doesn’t recognize Ugandan adoption, so she needed to redo the process of becoming Adam’s mother overseas.

After another lengthy process of securing a visa for Adam, Emilie and her eldest son relocated to her hometown in Worcestershire. Josh and their younger kids stayed in Uganda with the ultimate intention of reuniting in the U.K. eventually.

As difficult as the separation would be, the two parents believed that the best way forward was for Josh to handle Tallie, George and James’ adoption processes while Emilie stayed in England with Adam, whom she was able to adopt again, and he eventually obtained British citizenship. During their time as a long-distance family, Emilie planned to earn enough money to start applying for her partner and their three other kids’ U.K. immigration.

They spent three years thousands of miles apart, missing many milestones and simply missing each other. Back home in Uganda, the adoption proceedings weren’t moving quickly enough; Josh and Emilie decided they needed to bring their family back together — to most effectively push forward their bureaucratic processes and to ease the emotional strain of their separation.

Emilie and Adam returned to Uganda in late 2023, and the Larters have been there, all under one roof, ever since. However, despite the obstacles and delays, the family still endeavors to make their way overseas, and they are tapping their greatest resource for help doing so: social media.

They launched a GoFundMe page with an £80,000 (about $106,700) goal that will cover costs of visas, the remaining legal fees needed to finalize their three younger kids’ adoptions in Uganda and general relocation costs. The money will also help them essentially restart their lives in the U.K., since Emilie and Adam will need to purchase basic necessities, like a home and a car.

While the fundraiser’s aim is high, Emilie has shared the GoFundMe with her thousands of followers and subscribers across her YouTube, Instagram and TikTok profiles. She doesn’t expect that all of her finances will be paid off by donations, but she’s happy to bring her online community along for yet another step on her journey.

“There’s something about the power of social media, it can do crazy things,” she tells PEOPLE. “I’m hoping as things progress with the adoption here, that’ll get us more views and things like that as well. I’m optimistic.”

Once they move to the U.K. — where they plan to settle down in Emilie’s hometown, at least initially — Emilie says she and Josh will continue to maintain their connection to Uganda. In addition to their cultural ties to the country, they want their kids to visit their paternal grandparents regularly.

First, they’re all in on establishing a life in England. Emilie is certain that Josh, James, Tallie and George will be more than happy with the change in scenery.

“I don’t think they’ll have any problems whatsoever,” she adds of her Ugandan family. “I think if anything, they’ll thrive there.”