First, some really good news--our completed and approved home study is in the mail, guaranteed to arrive at our placing agency by noon on Monday!! I don't think it will take them more than a day to send it on to the next step in the process, since they are just as aware as we are of the time constraints on this adoption.
And now, for the edification of those of you who are not veterans of international adoption: a brief tour of the process, so that when I report on our progress you'll know what I'm talking about!
The process we are going through with this adoption is different in some ways than what we did with Esther, both because she was a healthy infant as opposed to a "waiting" child, and because since our adoption of Esther, the U.S. and China have both signed onto the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption. The Hague Convention is intended to make the process of international adoption more ethical and transparent, and to combat child trafficking. It is, I think, a step in a very good direction. But for adoptive parents it has added several additional layers of paperwork to the international adoption process, which was already complex. There are a couple of steps that I'm still a little unclear on, not having done them before. But, here goes: the process of adopting a "waiting" child from China under the Hague Convention!
Step 1: Identifying an agency or waiting child
Some people first decide that they are going to adopt, then decide which international adoption agency they would like to work with, and then start thinking about what kind of child they hope to be matched with. People in this first category might go all the way through Step 5 (LID) before being matched with a child. Others, like us, "find" their son- or daughter-to-be on an agency list first, and go with whatever agency is listing "their" child. Lucky for us, our son was listed with WACAP (World Association for Children and Parents), a large, reputable agency with lots of experience in many different kinds of adoptions, including adoptions from China. Their expertise has been very helpful to us already, and it makes us feel better about our tight timeline knowing that they have successfully shepherded other adoptive parents through some even tighter timelines. Plus, we feel confident that they have experience with all kinds of issues that adoptive families can have and would be able and willing to talk us through a crisis if we were to have one.
Step 2: Pre-approval (PA)
(This could happen anywhere in the first five steps, but for us it was our second step, because we already knew which child we wanted to adopt.) For this step, we had to send certain documents to China, such as a financial statement, medical forms that we filled out ourselves (not unlike the ones you fill out when seeing a new doctor for the first time, though not quite as long), and a letter describing how we intended to accommodate our hoped-for child's medical condition. WACAP also required us to fill out a great long document called a "Parenting Resource Plan" before they would submit our PA paperwork to China--this was an agency requirement, not China's requirement. This document asked us how we would handle pretty much any situation that might come up in an adoption, and I ended up writing twenty-plus pages to answer all the questions! Once our Parenting Resource Plan was completed and all our other documents had been duly mailed to WACAP, they submitted our request to the CCAA (China Center for Adoption Affairs) for pre-approval to adopt this particular child. The CCAA reviewed our documents, decided that we seemed to meet all the requirements based on that information, and granted us pre-approval. The process was supposed to take six weeks, but we got our PA in two! This was the point at which our son's profile disappeared off of WACAP's "waiting children" page, and the adoption suddenly felt a lot more real!
Step 3: home study
The home study is a comprehensive document, prepared by a licensed social worker, which describes the prospective adoptive family and their circumstances in detail, and in the end states whether or not they are recommended as adoptive parents at this time, and what sort of child(ren) (age, gender, level of special needs, etc.) they are recommended for. We are recommended for one or two children (with the understanding that two children should be siblings), male or female, 0-13 years of age, with mild or moderate medical special needs. Our home study took FOUR MONTHS to finish! And neither we nor our social worker was slacking. But, WACAP is not licensed to perform home studies in our state, so we had to find another agency to do our study. And while we love the agency we are working with locally and are very excited to know that they will be a resource to us in our post-adoption phase, they specialize in working with children in U.S. foster care, and their policy is that all adoptive parents must become licensed foster parents in this state in order to have an approved home study. So, we took hours upon hours of classes--foster parent training classes, a crisis de-escalation class, a first aid and CPR class--and met various other requirements that most international adoptive parents don't have to meet. There was one week that I was so stressed out about it all (or rather, about trying to do it all quickly) that I caught myself daydreaming that our son's foster parents had come forward and asked to adopt him (which would no doubt be a wonderful thing for him if it really happened, but I think if it was going to happen it would have before now), and we were off the hook. But the home study did eventually get finished, and as of today, we are not only approved as international prospective adoptive parents, but as a local foster care family. And while we won't be in a position to do long-term foster care anytime soon, it does mean that we, unlike most people, can legally babysit children who are in foster care. We actually know a couple of families in our area who are doing foster care, so that may come in handy!
Step 4: Immigration pre-approval (I-800A)
This is the next step for us. The immigration process can't be started until a family has an approved home study. Our home study, an application, and a very large fee will soon be going to the USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services). They will check to make sure that we are eligible to bring a newly adopted child into the United States as a family member. As part of that process, we will have to get our fingerprints made and have an FBI search done on them. Again. I have never understood why they can't use the results of the FBI check that we just did for our home study. I guess that would just make too much sense for a bureaucracy. Anyway, in a few weeks we will get a letter giving us an appointment date and time to go get our fingerprints taken. We can (and will) go to the designated place early and try to talk them into doing us as a walk-in so that we can get through this phase as quickly as possible. On the bright side, they scan prints into machines that tell you immediately whether or not the print is good enough quality and make you do it over until it is satisfactory, so my prints won't be rejected this time. Once our prints have cleared, we should receive an I-797C notice, which approves us in general to bring an adopted child from another country into the U.S. as a family member, thus giving them U.S. citizenship. The whole process takes around two months. If there are complications, it could take much longer. (But that is unlikely with our application, which is very straightforward.) If we do our fingerprints early, it could be shorter. We're hoping for shorter!
Step 4: Dossier
Our dossier is the official packet of documents that we send to China for review prior to them declaring us eligible to adopt. It includes our home study, medical forms filled out by a doctor, birth certificates, marriage certificate, police clearances, a financial statement, letters of employment, and things like that. Most of these forms have to be notarized, then sent to the Secretary of State of the state in which they were signed to have the notary's signature verified, then sent the the Chinese consulate with jurisdiction over that state to have the Secretary of State's signature authenticated. Then we send the notarized/verified/authenticated documents to WACAP to be translated into Chinese. We are already moving right along on this process, and expect to have most of our documents done in a few weeks. The last thing we need before the dossier can go to China is our I-797C notice (see Step 3 above). Then the dossier can be sent to China (giving us a DTC, "Date To China); logged in to the CCAA's system (giving us an LID, "Log-In Date"); and eventually read and approved by the staff of the CCAA. We expect that they will expedite us somewhat due to our son's age. I think this part of the process normally takes around six weeks, but I'm not sure. Once the CCAA has read and approved our dossier, they will generate a Letter of Acceptance (LOA) giving us official approval to adopt from China. (Since we already have PA, it is possible that our LOA will actually be called an LOC, Letter of Confirmation. Our agency has used that term, but I'm a little fuzzy on where it fits in the big picture!) I think that this is the point at which we are officially allowed to contact our son and start sending him letters, pictures, and care packages. We are also very hopeful that his orphanage will let us talk to him over skype.
Step 5: I-800 and Article 5
Once we have our final approval from China, we go back to the USCIS and file form I-800, letting them know which particular child we have been matched with. This is the part where I get fuzzy on who does what when, but the purpose of this step is for the U.S. to investigate this child's background and make sure that he is a true orphan by international standards and thus eligible for immigration as an adopted child. I think there are some sub-steps, to wit: the USCIS generates a provisional approval and cables it to the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou, which makes a further investigation and generates an Article 5, which gives us approval from the U.S. to adopt this specific child and bring him into the country.
Step 6: Travel Approval (TA)
Now we get to go back to the CCAA and inform them that we have been cleared by the U.S. to immigrate with our child. Upon receiving this information, the CCAA will issue us a document (Notice of Traveling to China, also called TA) that we can present to the Civil Affairs office on adoption day showing that we have permission to adopt this child. At the same time, they will notify the Civil Affairs office in the child's province that we are going to be coming to adopt the child.
Step 7: Consulate Appointment (CA)
Before we can leave China with our newly adopted child, he will need to go through a medical examination and some immigration paperwork at the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou. So, unless we are able to be very flexible about the length of our trip to China, we need to know what date we will be appearing at the Consulate before we get our plane tickets. Generally families are able to get more-or-less the date they request, and it only takes a day or so to get it settled.
Step 8: travel arrangements
No alphabet soup here, just setting a date with the child's orphanage and Civil Affairs office for us to take custody of the child and go through the formalities of adoption, and then buying plane tickets and booking hotel rooms. Last time we did all this by ourselves, but this time our agency will do much of it for us.
According to the current laws of the People's Republic of China, children who are fourteen or older cannot be adopted. Our son's 14th birthday in on June 20. So, we have to have all these steps completed and be in his province before June 20th. (The consulate part of the process can be done after his birthday; U.S. law allows children to be adopted and brought in up through age sixteen.) With all the steps we have yet to go through, I don't see much chance of us traveling before June. So, unlike most adoptive parents, we don't have the stress of wondering when we are going to travel to meet our child--just the stress of wondering how we're going to get everything done before our deadline! However, we both feel a lot better now that our home study is finished. We are now done with most of the grinding paperwork, and what we have ahead of us is a lot of hurry-up-and-wait as we let the agencies of two governments do their thing.
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