Why the delay?

Many of you have been asking why we're experiencing a bit of a delay in the adoption process. I thought I'd take this opportunity to answer that question, and at the same time, give you a bit of a primer on the wild and wacky world that is international adoption.

First off, keep in mind that through international adoption you must negotiate... not one... not two... but three ... large, cumbersome and, at times, bloated bureaucratic behemoths. To get a sense of what this is like, think back to the the last time you had to deal with any bureaucratic institution (and I say this as a full fledged member of the bureacratic profession). Perhaps you've moved recently and had to get all new id. Think back to that inevitable moment when you stood head to head with an automaton - also known as a bureacrat - trying to convince them that in all likelihood the person who wrote "client must stand on head while reciting the alphabet... backwards... in German" was probably joking. Now triple it... and you have an idea of what international adoption is like. Not only do you have to deal with the federal and provincial governments, a foreign government and language are thrown in for good measure. What this all means at the very heart is chronic unpredictability.

The first stage of the process is the home study. This is essentially a number of meetings with a social worker whose primary role is to attest in a report that you are not aliens from a distant solar system... and oh, ya, and that you'd probably be able to raise a happy, healthy child. The home study consists primarily of paper work. Lots and lots of paper work. Luckily, all of this is gathered in Canada. We started our particular home study in December of 2004, and completed the paper work with all the trimmings in the late spring of 2005.

Once that is all together, you have to convince the province (in our case Ontario) that you are not said aliens from a distant solar system and in all likelihood you'll be able to reasonably raise a child. This is the time when you are chasing provincial approval. This takes anywhere from a couple of weeks to forever, depending on the phases of the moon, whether it's a leap year, and more importantly, whether the Ministry has enough bodies to deal with all the applications.

Once all that is together, the entire package, notarized and translated, gets shipped off to the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA). Once it's there, you are assigned a Log in Date (aka LID). At this point in the process, you are also assigned a Group Number. Our LID is June 3, 2005, and we've been assigned to Group 233. In the grand scheme of things, this means very little, but in practice it means you are now able to obsess over timelines, track the progress of the groups ahead of you and spend hours trying to decode the mysteries of the timetable and guess at a possible referral date. Ah yes, the referral date! This now becomes the elusive goal you chase incessantly, if only in your mind. It's the point where the CCAA finally matches waiting parents with a waiting child - the moment when you get the first little bits of information about your baby to be.

So the all important question that you're all wishing I would finally get to is: where are we in the march of the timetable? How soon can we expect the referral? When we first started the process, the average wait from LID to referral was 6 to 7 months. This timeline has, regrettably, slowed and our agency (Children's Bridge) is now guesstimating an average wait of 9 months from LID to referral. The last group to receive a referral was 228 (with an LID of March 29) in November. Typically (and this process is nothing if not atypical), we have seen at least one group a month receive referrals, sometimes more. However, Children's Bridge is now saying that the CCAA has been a little overun with applications, and will only be able to process applications for part of a month instead of the entire month as has been the typical approach for the last little while. What this means in practice is that the next group up, Group 229 (with an LID of April 15), may not make the cut-off for December referrals, and so there might not be any referrals through our agency for the month of December.

Based on conjecture and wishful thinking (not unlike the basis of most of Tamara's PhD thesis), it is possible that we'll receive the referral in April. In the meantime... we wait. And we remember that there are thousands of families who have travelled this same road and came home with a happy, healthy little one in their arms (if a little cranky from a 15 hour plane ride).

We've also been catching up on Chinese culture and history, which with several millenia is rather hard to catch up on. The CIA, however, (I'm not kidding) has provided us with a handy dandy cheat sheet, so check it out if you're interested: http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ch.html