Expedited Referrals

The process of Chinese international adopting is long and tedious. The first part (the paperchase) consists of getting various documents ranging from medical exams, FBI checks, fingerprinting, to a home study (where a social worker will come to your home to interview the prospective adopting parents - PAP's). All the documents need to be notarized and authenticated, then translated into Chinese, before the entire dossier is forwarded to China. The 'date-to-China' (DTC) is a big deal, but the more important date is the 'log-in-date' (LID). By following the LID's of other PAP's you can determine how far along the CCAA is in matching children to families. You start getting excited once the LID's are approaching your own. Our LID is 3/21/07.

Once your dossier is in China, it follows one of two 'tracks'. The regular track is followed by most PAP's that apply for international adoption. However, if one has Chinese ancestry, then one can be expedited. How can one 'qualify' as Chinese? Having Chinese blood is not sufficient. Only if one can prove that he/she was born in the People's Republic of China, Taiwan (China), or Hong Kong, China, then a couple can be expedited. Or if one set of prospective grandparents can provide documentation that they were born in China, Taiwan, or Hong Kong, then the PAP's can be expedited. We would qualify for expedited status because Roger's birth certificate states his place of birth was Hong Kong. So when our dossier was submitted to China, we requested expedited status, but... there is really no way of knowing which 'track' we are on.

That is where Roger and I are at. The referrals for the non-expedited families are up to LID of 1/25/06, whereas the referrals for expedited families are up to 12/06. At the rate that the CCAA is matching non-expedited families, it may be 2012 before we get a referral. If that's the case, I think we would give up. As difficult as that might be (especially for Larissa), I think we would prefer to move on with our lives and be able to do things as a family of three. (And I could go ahead and sell all of those clothes and toys I've been saving...). However, if we are expedited, then we may be looking at a referral before the end of 2008! The next few months will be very interesting indeed.