Dossier in Paris

It's so neat to be able to track the Fedex package. This morning our dossier departed the Fedex location in Paris, France. I wish I was there too...

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!

Dossier is on its way to Ukraine!!!

We ended up driving to Albany again as we needed 2 more apostilles, but didn't have time to do it by mail. But as of today our paperwork is in the hands of Fedex and should be in Kiev by May 15th. I still can't believe it :) I expected the postage to cost about $50, but since our dossier's weight was a little bit over 1 lb, it cost me $95 :( Oh well, it's nothing compare to our overall costs :) We'll survive!

Paperwork - continued

After I overnighted all documents to Albany on Tuesday, I thought I'll get them back in a couple of days since I included pre-paid envelope for overnight services. In the reality, it takes 2-4 business days to process them. When we drove to Albany to put the apostilles on the original set of documents, it took 15 minutes to get the apostilles. Apparently, when you send it by mail, the timing is different. We were hoping to send the dossier to Ukraine with very good friends of ours who are going to Kiev this coming Sunday. But if we don't get the paperwork by then, we'll just send it by FedEx.

I'm also waiting for another document. As I mentioned in the previous post, NY state refers to all licenses as "Registration Certificates", and it's not very clear to SDA. So, in addition of getting a separate notarized copy of my social worker's "Registration Certificate", aka "License", I requested a separate letter from the Office of the Profession from the NYS Department of Education. This letter will state that she's indeed licensed in the NY State.

If everything works as expected, our facilitator hopes to submit our dossier at the end of May. Then we'll wait until SDA processes it (takes about about 6 weeks), and gets us an appointment date, approximately in August/September.

The paperwork nightmare

Well, the good news is that our facilitator (who we really like) is very meticulous and wants to make sure all documents in our dossier are in order so that SDA (State Department of Adoptions) can't reject them. The bad news is that we had to make corrections to several documents. Of course it's not that bad, it's just another cycle of the paperwork: notarize, certify at the County Clerk's office, send to Albany to apostille. Sergey (0ur facilitator in Kiev) helped us to rewrite our cover letter, made changes to the Power of Attorney documents, found an incorrect birth date in the Home Study and asked to submit a separate copy of our social worker's license. Apparently, NY State issues a so-called "Registration Certificate" for all professions (doctors, nurses, social workers, etc). It really means "license", which is clear to us, but not clear to bureaucrats at SDA. Luckily, my social worker was very cooperative and gave me the notarized copy immediately. I certified all 6 new/updated documents in the Country Clerk office today after work and raced to the post office to send them overnight to the Albany in order to get the apostilles. Hopefully they'll process them soon, so we'll be able to send everything to Ukraine (so far they worked with our scanned documents only).

It's interesting how everything is more expensive in NY State, even document certification. It costs $3 to certify a notary signature at the Country Clerk's office, and $10 to issue an apostille at the Department of State. All our documents but one were issued in NY State. The only document out of state is Oleg's employment letter, since the consulting company he works for is located in Michigan. Guess what? There is no need to certify a notary signature at the Country Clerk's office, and the cost for the apostille is only $1, which is 13 times cheaper than in NY State :)

One step further

We are making progress!!! We signed a contract with the law firm in Kiev, which specializes in the adoption law. They'll take care of all legal matters, including but not limited to translating and submitting our dossier, getting an appointment date at SDA, helping to prepare the court documents, etc. They work with adoption agencies in USA and Italy and have a lot of experience helping families with the adoption process. I really like the way they do business - very professionally with the top-notch customer service. They sure know how to work with American citizens :) Currently they are reviewing our paperwork. If everything is in order, we hope to send our dossier to Ukraine next week!

The line

I talked to a very nice woman in Kiev who might be able to submit our dossier. The problem is, the virtual line to submit the dossiers is about 200 people, and SDA (State Department of Adoptions) accepts only about 8-9 dossiers a week from american citizens. It means that by the time we get to the beginning of the line, all our documents will expire and we'll have to re-do all paperwork again :( I'm still hoping my girlfriend (and Raisa's guardian) in Odessa will be able to come up with the faster (though more expensive) solution.

Dossier is ready

Looks like we finally have our dossier ready: today we went to Albany to put the apostilles on all the documents. All U.S. documents submitted to the Ukrainian government must be authenticated. It means that all notaries signatures first need to be authenticated at the Country Clerks Office and then apostilled at the Department of State at Albany. On Tuesday I went to the Country Clerks Office to authenticate the signatures of all the notaries on our documents, and today we drove to Albany to get the apostilles. We could've sent them by mail, but I was really afraid to send all my 16 original documents, so we've decided to go and do it in person. It's just over 3 hours drive, so it was not too bad. We were expecting to wait a long time, but as with every other stop for our other adoption paper, it was short and smooth, the workers there were very nice.

Now the big question remains - who will submit our dossier! The State Department of Adoption in Ukraine changes rules almost daily. There is a quota of 558 dossiers a year from American citizens, and the only day and time to submit a dossier is Monday from 2 to 4. There is a huge line of people wanting to submit it, and the facilitators (people hired by prospective adoptive parents to help them with paperwork in Ukraine) have to check in with this unofficial line twice a week. To make the matters worse, SDA is not accepting any new dossiers from foreign citizens this week and next week due to staff resignations there, including director, deputy directors, and others. So for now we are just waiting while my girlfriend in Odessa is trying very hard to find somebody to help us.