new rules & current wait times

We just returned from an Informational Meeting for China Families to go over the new rules and the current wait times.

First, I would like to say that I love our agency. From what I have seen, we are with one of the most personally involved, supportive and informative agencies available. The founder of our agency as well as our social workers are great advocates for us and try to get as much information as they can to keep us updated.

The following is a summary my notes from the meeting:

• Wait time is officially 16 months (no surprise) and going up on average about 2 weeks per month. They do expect it to get longer, but did not specify.
• Due to the longer wait times, we WILL have to redo some of our paperwork since it will most likely expire before we get our referral.
  1. CIS Fingerprint Clearance - Expires June 21, 2007
  2. I-171H - Expires October 20, 2007
• Reasons for Longer Wait
  (this is all educated speculation on the part of our agency based on their knowledge and experience in China adoption)
  1. Not as many babies eligible for International Adoption - this is actually a reason given officially by the CCAA - due to the influx of applications
  *Apparently, it used to be common practice that the larger IA approved** orphanages would go out to the smaller rural orphanages and bring back babies to put up for IA (not black market stuff - this was all legal). The chinese gov't. stopped this practice a few years ago for some reason, so even though there are still lots of children available in China, they are not necessarily available in IA sanctioned orphanages. This probably explains why some people report orphanages are deserted and others are full?
  **Not all orphanages are approved to be eligible for International Adoption.
  2. Since there are more applications than babies, China can be more particular
  3. OLYMPICS - this is the biggest reason our agency thinks things have "slowed down". Based on what Korea went through when they hosted the Olympics many years ago, it is widely assumed that China is concerned about how the world perceives the "export" of its children. Apparently, Korea was very ashamed at the coverage of adoption during the Olympics and ultimately closed the IA program for ten years. China is committed to the IA program, but many people believe that they are trying to minimize any backlash by slowing down the amount of children that are adopted internationally each year.
  4. They were very specific to mention that the Chinese DO NOT want to stop the IA program and they are extremely committed to continuiung the program.
• NEW RULES
  They did point out that in comparison to other programs, China is really just "catching up" on their regulations since most of the other programs out there (especially Asian) were already this strict or even more so. If you want to see the complete list of new regulations as published by the CCAA, click here and here. Since we are already logged in, we were ASSURED that the new rules will not affect us. These new regulations will take affect as of May 1, 2007.

*update: I apologize for the format, on my screen it is all nice and neat with little bullets and such, but for some reason they aren't translating correctly on the blog. And, I have no idea what to say about the link for the regulations - this is the best I can do for now. I need some tech help! . . . anyone?