Waiting for submission

Waiting, waiting, waiting. Our facilitator is hoping to submit our dossier in the early July - we are really hoping it will be the case! And our situation is not that bad. We know who we are going to adopt and sooner or later it will happen.

For some people it's not that easy. Since Ukraine adoption laws don't allow preselection, the families are usually presented with several profiles during their appointment in Kiev. But sometimes there are no healthy young children available on that day, so the families must make a decision - either accept a referral for the older child, or wait for another appointment. Currently, about 50 families are in Kiev waiting for 2nd or even 3rd appointments. Can you imagine how hard it is? One would ask: there are so many orphans in Ukraine, why they are not available for adoption? In order to be available for International adoption, the kids should be placed on the adoption registry: one month on the local level, one month on the regional level and one year on the national level. In theory, the children should be available in 14 months after they first were added to the local registry. But in the real life it's much more than that! For some unknown reason, it takes more than a month to transfer from one registry to another. I don't know why - it's just the Ukrainian way. So it's more like 16 - 17 months. Also, many children are lost in the system and are not registered at all! So while we are waiting for our appointment, we really hope the waiting families will find their kids and the waiting kids will find their parents soon.

Raisa on vacation

My friend Lena, who's Raya's legal guardian, took her to the Carpathian Mountains for a weeklong vacation. I'm so fortunate to have Lena - I don't know what we would do without her. Here are a couple of pictures from that place:

This is a lake next to the hotel:

This is a hotel where they are staying:

Adoption blogs

As a PAP (acronym for prospective adoptive parents) I spend a lot of time reading adoption blogs of people who already completed their adoption, are in Ukraine now or still in the paperwork stage. It helps me to find a lot of valuable information, get answers to many questions and prepare for our own upcoming trip to Ukraine. Some blogs are quite entertaining as their authors have natural writing talent, some just describe the facts, I love to read them all. But there is one blog, which just took my heart.

Jim and Dana Hale are in Odessa now adopting their two beautiful teenage daughters. Somehow they were able to capture the essense of Odessa and its people in their blog - not only it reads like a book, but it's also written from the bottom of their hearts. They talk about my hometown with such love, you would never guess they weren't born there :) Thank you very much from the native "odessit" for letting the world know about Odessa - The Pearl Of The Black Sea.

Waiting

Nothing new on the adoption front. I heard the SDA isn't accepting any new dossiers from Americans until July 2nd - they already met their quota for the second quarter. There is a number of dossiers for each country that can be submitted to SDA. It's 558 for USA in 2007, and 280 dossiers have already been submitted for American citizens.


I have a very cute picture to share. This is Victoria and Alex just before Victoria's dance recital:

No news

We are still waiting for our dossier to be submitted to the State Department of Adoptions. It's hard not knowing when we'll be going to Ukraine. In most cases people get an appointment date in about 3 months after dossier was submitted. For example, one family submitted on April 30th and found yesterday that their appointment is July 26th. However, another family submitted on February 19th, and also found out yesterday that their appointment is at the end of July. So we'll wait and see.

Adoption process in Ukraine

The process to adopt from Ukraine is very long, tedious and nerve-wrecking. It involves many steps, a lot of paperwork and a lot of red tape. One of the frequent posters on the FRUA (Families for Russian and Ukrainian Adoptions) chat board wrote her own humorous version of the process and gave her permission to use it in my blog. Thank you, Beth2!

Here it is:

- First, you have a homestudy done and do a lot of paperwork to get approval from your state.

- Then you do a lot of paperwork that costs a lot of money and takes a ridiculously long time to get approval from our federal government.

- Then you send a bunch of paperwork to Ukraine to get translated and you wait for it to get submitted to the Ukrainian adoption officials in Kiev.

- When it finally gets submitted, you wait for your initial approval in Ukraine. If you get that approval, you get an appointment to come to Kiev. You have to go when they tell you to go. You don't get to decide the appointment time.

- At your appointment, you get a referral for a child or a sibling group of children according to your homestudy. You go to the region where the kids are and seek local approval to adopt them, praying for a court date within the near future.

- If all goes well in court, you wait 10 more days and do more paperwork within the Ukrainian system. When that's done, you go back to Kiev, get medical exams for the kids for our government and give our government even more money to get visas allowing you to bring the kids home.

Then you come home and the real adventure begins.

The waiting game

Now that our dossier is in Ukraine, we just have to wait until our facilitator is able to submit it to the State Department of Adoptions. During the last several weeks they accepted only 5-7 dossiers a week from American families. Knowing that there are more than 200 families waiting in line to submit, it may be a long time to get to the front of the line. Most facilitators have multiple places in line. Some of them don't even have the dossiers to submit yet, but they are trying to be proactive so that by the time they get to the front of the line they will have a dossier to submit. Some of them already have a dossier ready, but the place in line is far from the front. So it varies in each individual case. Our facilitator has several places in line (I don't know the numbers though), so I really hope he'll be able to submit it soon before our documents start to expire. This past Monday several people pushed their way ahead of the line and submitted the dossiers out of order. There was even a physical confrontation there!

Also, I heard that a director of SDA was finally appointed yesterday. The previous director resigned 2 months ago, and since then SDA was operating with interim director and understaffed. I feel optimistic that the new director is the good news for all prospective adoptive parents :)

Delivered!