What's next?

Now we wait. And wait. And wait again. Basically once our facilitator receives our dossier, he should submit it to SDA. This sounds easy, but it's not - as I mentioned in my previous posts, there is a line for each country in order to submit a dossier. One facilitator can only submit one dossier at a time, the only day when they allow submission for American citizens is Monday, and only from 2 to 4 pm. Last several weeks they accepted anywhere from 5 to 7 dossiers a week, so the line is moving very slowly.

Once this step is done, the SDA begins the review process. If everything is in order, we'll get an appointment date to come to Kiev and meet with the head of adoption department. Officially it takes 20 working days to get an appointment date, and the date used to be about 3 months from the date of submission. But lately it's more like 30-40 working days to review the dossier, and the appointment date about 4 - 4.5 months from the date of submission. For example, people who submitted in January were notified in February about their April appointment. I heard about one family who submitted on March 5th, and found out yesterday, May 8th, that they have an appointment on July 17th, which is 4.5 months after submission.

We were planning for a May submission and August travel date, but looks like we'll be traveling later. This is both good and bad news. The good news is that the airfare goes down dramatically in September. The bad news is that Raisa won't be able to start the school year from the beginning. Also, we won't be able to swim in the Black Sea :)

During appointment at SDA people are usually given several profiles of kids available for adoption. In our case we know who we are adopting, but the rules are the same. Raisa should be available for adoption (i.e. be on the national adoption registry), and we have to physically come to SDA for the interview. After the interview we get our paperwork back (with more stamps :) and go to Odessa to start preparations for the court. This step is not easy either. It requires more paperwork, which should go from Odessa to Kiev to get the approval of SDA and then back to Odessa.

After the court we wait mandatory 10 days during which time appeals to the court decision can be filed. If nobody files the appeal (hopefully not!) we get the court decree, race to get a new birth certificate and a passport for Raisa and go to US Embassy in Kiev to get the visa. Then the three of us we'll fly home!