The following was emailed to my Mommy Forum on 12/31/2006...
On the eve of a much-anticipated new year (at least on our end!), I thought I'd do another "lesson" for you:) This time I decided I'd write about the ever-growing wait time to try to answer any questions you may have. This will not be exhaustive by any means -- there are so many issues that affect the wait, many of which no one outside China even understands, so all we can really do is speculate and just hope that the wait will stabilize soon.
As you know, we have a log-in date (LID) at the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA) of June 23, 2006. We started the process last January, but as far as China is concerned, our LID is the only date that matters. So while we've been waiting almost a year, we're "officially" just over the 6 months mark in terms of the referral timeframe (meaning the time from our LID until we get matched by the CCAA with our child, i.e. referral.). This is helpful for you to know in that the "wait time" you'll hear us mention is this referral timeframe - so essentially, when you hear us say the wait is now at 16 months (and sadly, it is), that is the wait from LID to referral. If nothing were to change, this means we'd get our referral 16 months from 6/23/06 and travel 6-8 weeks after that, which would be next December.
The caveat to this explanation is that this timeframe actually has nothing to do with our adoption, but rather it is a gauge of families currently receiving their referrals. In other words, families receiving their referrals now have waited 16 months from log-in. Because this timeframe continually changes based on the number of families adopting and the number of children available for adoption, it doesn't tell us a whole lot about when we'll be adopting our baby. It's purely based on past trends, and it's just speculation, a "system" that hasn't proven accurate at all since we started the process....You may remember that referrals were happening at 9 months from log-in when we began last January (the summer before it was 6 months), and not knowing how long the paperchase (start of adoption to LID) would take, we were thinking we'd be traveling late winter/early spring of 2007. Boy, were we wrong!
Even though the number of adoptive families and abandoned babies is continually changing (which explains a bit about the unknowns in the process and the effect on the wait), you may still find it hard to understand why one can't speculate more accurately about the adoption timeline. Well, one problem is that the Chinese are a very tight-lipped people, and they simply don't disclose much information about what's happening. For instance, they don't publicize how many children they have available for adoption or how many children they're allowing to be adopted internationally, nor will they make an official statement about the number of dossiers they're processing from families trying to adopt from China, or how many employees they've committed to the process and whether they're going to try to process more dossiers than they have in the past, etc. etc. If they shared even half of this information, we'd have a much better chance of accurately predicting when we'll travel, but that's just not the case.
In their defense, I can see why the CCAA doesn't want to provide much information -- if their mission is solely about finding homes for their children, then they don't want prospective families to be turned away by a wait with no apparent end in sight. And I'm sure they're working as hard and fast as they can, and they probably don't have any control over their government funding, which of course affects their ability to hire more people and minimize the backlog.
BUT poor waiting families, so many of whom have already dealt with years of infertility before beginning the adoption process. I have read so many comments on the web from tormented souls who have been wanting children for years and years, and the wait is just unbearable for them. Each month that they don't get their referral when they were expecting it becomes yet another loss. It is truly a painful, difficult process, and I understand how people become obsessed -- it's like you just forget that you were once happy before you ever thought about having children, and you can literally think of nothing else.
AND then there are the waiting children...
But back to explaining the wait: There are some folks out there (more obsessed waiting parents), who are very knowledgeable about China adoption and have accumulated a wealth of information about past and current trends and continue to gather information, which they've made available on the Internet to help people make predictions. One thing they do is track the time between referrals, e.g. the number of days since China mailed out the last group of referrals until now (China doesn't release referrals on a regular schedule, which is another factor that makes it very difficult to predict the timeline -- it's generally once a month, but currently we're at over a month since the last group of families received referrals). They also track the number of LIDs processed with each group of referrals (i.e. if there are 30 days in a month, there are 30 days of LIDs, and they're looking for the number of days in that month for which families actually received referrals). Sometimes the CCAA processes more, sometimes less -- I think the last group only covered like 9 days at the end of August '05. Again, it depends on the total number of babies and families (and methinks China's political, economic and social climate as well, which as you know is changing rapidly).
So what does this tell us: If they're only processing 9 days of LIDs in 39 days, they're slowing way down. This explains the dynamics of the "backlog" that you may have heard about, and the reason the backlog and thus the wait just keep growing. We've been watching this happen all year. To explain further, the ideal would be for the CCAA to process 30 LIDs in 30 days or less, keeping the wait at a year or less. Of course they'd have to have a period of processing more than 30 (or 31) LIDs each month in order to speed things up and bring the wait down at this point. Seeing them process 2 months of LIDs in a month (and then continue that trend) would basically be the most exciting thing waiting families could ever have happen because we would see the wait decrease pretty dramatically. Unfortunately, that doesn't appear likely, but we can hope!
So you see it's all still speculation, but the info on the web feels more accurate (at least more realistic) to me than the timeframe that the adoption agencies provide. I should add that the agencies have to follow strict guidelines and really aren't allowed to speculate if they want to stay in good graces with the CCAA. And to give you an idea about the power of the CCAA: One of the websites to which I've been referring doesn't allow people to name their agency when they post comments on her site because the agency could get in trouble with the CCAA, and the site owner/moderator is anonymous herself -- all we know is that she's an adoptive mom, who has adopted one daughter from China already and is currently waiting for her second child. So you can see why the agencies provide a timeline based on the past - because that's all they can do. As for me, I'm going with what I'm reading on the web these days, and it's not looking promising for us to bring our baby home in '07 -- of course I am an optimist at heart, so with the first glimmer of hope that the wait is stabilizing I will be back to baby shopping!
The crazy thing is that even with all the unknowns China's adoption program is considered to be more predictable than any other out there. So we should really just keep being thankful and counting our blessings...but of course it ain't easy. As you can imagine, the lack of any real knowledge coupled with watching the wait grow almost every month since we began the process is incredibly difficult. It's the never-ending pregnancy! But of course it will end, and we'll have our precious baby girl, and we will know that the timing was perfect:) By the way, her name is Noelle 'her Chinese name' Clarke.
If your brain isn't fried and you want to continue reading, I've copied some comments that were posted on the web (at http://www.chinaadopttalk.com/), which provide some insight into the actual WHY of the growing wait beyond the logistics of processing paperwork. Again, for the most part it's speculation, but you may find it helpful.
Love to you all, and very best wishes in 2007!
Kathryn
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>copied from web:
Our agency in Sweden had a meeting with the CCAA's Vice Director, Mr. Zhang Zhong, in Stockholm on May 12, 2006. This is some of the information released from that meeting (I translated quickly from Swedish, so please bear with me):
During a period, the wait has been growing longer and longer because of a greater amount of applications coinciding with a declining amount of children available for adoption. CCAA predicts that the wait from LID to referral will stabilize around 11-12 months. (Note from Kathryn: This clearly has not happened, but perhaps it will in time.) CCAA does not believe that the wait ever will be as short as it once was. Families that apply for adoption in China will have to expect and accept the longer wait.
CCAA and the provinces are looking into the possibility of educating and licensing more orphanages for IA (International Adoption). Preparations and investigations are going on right now. CCAA is also reviewing the qualification rules for adoption applicants and will give out more info when this is finished. (Note from Kathryn: They have recently updated their "preferences" for adoptive families, which will decrease the pool of applicants, but these changes come too late to impact our wait.)
The number of in-country (national) adoptions in China are growing, which CCAA is positive about. There are no official statistics, but these adoptions far outnumber the international adoptions. (Note from Kathryn: I've read that the rules governing domestic adoption in China have been eased, and also that as the country becomes more prosperous, more people can afford to adopt and/or pay the fines associated with having more than one child.) The number of abandoned children in China is decreasing, due to the positive economic development that is taking place right now. However, the population in China is huge, and therefore it is believed that International Adoptions will be necessary for a long time to come.
(Note from Kathryn: This point forward is the writer sharing her own observations and insights.) Some orphanages do have less babies than they’ve had in a long time. This seems to be especially true in areas with economic prosperity. However, there are sadly many stories of orphanages that are full. Very full. We don’t know for sure why there are less "paper-ready" babies. There appear to still be plenty of babies in orphanages, but for whatever reason they are not being made available for the IA program. (Note from Kathryn: "Paper-ready" refers to the babies that are available for adoption vs. all abandoned babies in China. No one outside China understands what's going when it comes to this. People mainly speculate that it's a result of China not wanting the rest of the world to know the extent of their problem, and so they only adopt out a certain number of children to other countries. Of course it could also be that the demand for domestic adoption is growing so rapidly that they're anticipating finding homes for all the remaining children -- let's hope that's the case.)
Some of the babies are not eligible for legal reasons. The paper trail from initial discovery after abandonment until they arrive in the orphanage must meet certain criteria or the child will not be legally able to be placed into the IA program. This is to make sure that babies who are placed internationally were truly abandoned.
(Note from Kathryn: This next part is in response to someone stating that there are many less babies available for adoption.) Sorry Brian, I’ve had too many people return from China and email me information about orphanages. Some are returning to orphanages that they visited when they originally adopted their child, and there are more babies there now than there were several years ago. And they are not all SN (special needs), only a small percentage are SN.
Some return to orphanages and discover that an orphanage that had 100 babies a couple of years ago now has 30, and 20 of them are SN - it does happen that way. But there are plenty of orphanages that are overflowing. And there are orphanage directors who complain that the CCAA will not let them send much paperwork in for their babies. I don’t understand it, but I have too many emails with specifics to ignore it. (end of web comments)
* * * * * * There are so many unknowns -- just please say a prayer that beyond all the bureaucracy, our little girl is well cared for and loved, that someone picks her up when she cries and feeds her when she's hungry, and maybe even rocks her, talks to her and smiles at her -- and that if there is no one there, somewhere within her little spirit she knows she's coming home to us and that she will be loved forever. May she wait peacefully.
On the eve of a much-anticipated new year (at least on our end!), I thought I'd do another "lesson" for you:) This time I decided I'd write about the ever-growing wait time to try to answer any questions you may have. This will not be exhaustive by any means -- there are so many issues that affect the wait, many of which no one outside China even understands, so all we can really do is speculate and just hope that the wait will stabilize soon.
As you know, we have a log-in date (LID) at the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA) of June 23, 2006. We started the process last January, but as far as China is concerned, our LID is the only date that matters. So while we've been waiting almost a year, we're "officially" just over the 6 months mark in terms of the referral timeframe (meaning the time from our LID until we get matched by the CCAA with our child, i.e. referral.). This is helpful for you to know in that the "wait time" you'll hear us mention is this referral timeframe - so essentially, when you hear us say the wait is now at 16 months (and sadly, it is), that is the wait from LID to referral. If nothing were to change, this means we'd get our referral 16 months from 6/23/06 and travel 6-8 weeks after that, which would be next December.
The caveat to this explanation is that this timeframe actually has nothing to do with our adoption, but rather it is a gauge of families currently receiving their referrals. In other words, families receiving their referrals now have waited 16 months from log-in. Because this timeframe continually changes based on the number of families adopting and the number of children available for adoption, it doesn't tell us a whole lot about when we'll be adopting our baby. It's purely based on past trends, and it's just speculation, a "system" that hasn't proven accurate at all since we started the process....You may remember that referrals were happening at 9 months from log-in when we began last January (the summer before it was 6 months), and not knowing how long the paperchase (start of adoption to LID) would take, we were thinking we'd be traveling late winter/early spring of 2007. Boy, were we wrong!
Even though the number of adoptive families and abandoned babies is continually changing (which explains a bit about the unknowns in the process and the effect on the wait), you may still find it hard to understand why one can't speculate more accurately about the adoption timeline. Well, one problem is that the Chinese are a very tight-lipped people, and they simply don't disclose much information about what's happening. For instance, they don't publicize how many children they have available for adoption or how many children they're allowing to be adopted internationally, nor will they make an official statement about the number of dossiers they're processing from families trying to adopt from China, or how many employees they've committed to the process and whether they're going to try to process more dossiers than they have in the past, etc. etc. If they shared even half of this information, we'd have a much better chance of accurately predicting when we'll travel, but that's just not the case.
In their defense, I can see why the CCAA doesn't want to provide much information -- if their mission is solely about finding homes for their children, then they don't want prospective families to be turned away by a wait with no apparent end in sight. And I'm sure they're working as hard and fast as they can, and they probably don't have any control over their government funding, which of course affects their ability to hire more people and minimize the backlog.
BUT poor waiting families, so many of whom have already dealt with years of infertility before beginning the adoption process. I have read so many comments on the web from tormented souls who have been wanting children for years and years, and the wait is just unbearable for them. Each month that they don't get their referral when they were expecting it becomes yet another loss. It is truly a painful, difficult process, and I understand how people become obsessed -- it's like you just forget that you were once happy before you ever thought about having children, and you can literally think of nothing else.
AND then there are the waiting children...
But back to explaining the wait: There are some folks out there (more obsessed waiting parents), who are very knowledgeable about China adoption and have accumulated a wealth of information about past and current trends and continue to gather information, which they've made available on the Internet to help people make predictions. One thing they do is track the time between referrals, e.g. the number of days since China mailed out the last group of referrals until now (China doesn't release referrals on a regular schedule, which is another factor that makes it very difficult to predict the timeline -- it's generally once a month, but currently we're at over a month since the last group of families received referrals). They also track the number of LIDs processed with each group of referrals (i.e. if there are 30 days in a month, there are 30 days of LIDs, and they're looking for the number of days in that month for which families actually received referrals). Sometimes the CCAA processes more, sometimes less -- I think the last group only covered like 9 days at the end of August '05. Again, it depends on the total number of babies and families (and methinks China's political, economic and social climate as well, which as you know is changing rapidly).
So what does this tell us: If they're only processing 9 days of LIDs in 39 days, they're slowing way down. This explains the dynamics of the "backlog" that you may have heard about, and the reason the backlog and thus the wait just keep growing. We've been watching this happen all year. To explain further, the ideal would be for the CCAA to process 30 LIDs in 30 days or less, keeping the wait at a year or less. Of course they'd have to have a period of processing more than 30 (or 31) LIDs each month in order to speed things up and bring the wait down at this point. Seeing them process 2 months of LIDs in a month (and then continue that trend) would basically be the most exciting thing waiting families could ever have happen because we would see the wait decrease pretty dramatically. Unfortunately, that doesn't appear likely, but we can hope!
So you see it's all still speculation, but the info on the web feels more accurate (at least more realistic) to me than the timeframe that the adoption agencies provide. I should add that the agencies have to follow strict guidelines and really aren't allowed to speculate if they want to stay in good graces with the CCAA. And to give you an idea about the power of the CCAA: One of the websites to which I've been referring doesn't allow people to name their agency when they post comments on her site because the agency could get in trouble with the CCAA, and the site owner/moderator is anonymous herself -- all we know is that she's an adoptive mom, who has adopted one daughter from China already and is currently waiting for her second child. So you can see why the agencies provide a timeline based on the past - because that's all they can do. As for me, I'm going with what I'm reading on the web these days, and it's not looking promising for us to bring our baby home in '07 -- of course I am an optimist at heart, so with the first glimmer of hope that the wait is stabilizing I will be back to baby shopping!
The crazy thing is that even with all the unknowns China's adoption program is considered to be more predictable than any other out there. So we should really just keep being thankful and counting our blessings...but of course it ain't easy. As you can imagine, the lack of any real knowledge coupled with watching the wait grow almost every month since we began the process is incredibly difficult. It's the never-ending pregnancy! But of course it will end, and we'll have our precious baby girl, and we will know that the timing was perfect:) By the way, her name is Noelle 'her Chinese name' Clarke.
If your brain isn't fried and you want to continue reading, I've copied some comments that were posted on the web (at http://www.chinaadopttalk.com/), which provide some insight into the actual WHY of the growing wait beyond the logistics of processing paperwork. Again, for the most part it's speculation, but you may find it helpful.
Love to you all, and very best wishes in 2007!
Kathryn
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>copied from web:
Our agency in Sweden had a meeting with the CCAA's Vice Director, Mr. Zhang Zhong, in Stockholm on May 12, 2006. This is some of the information released from that meeting (I translated quickly from Swedish, so please bear with me):
During a period, the wait has been growing longer and longer because of a greater amount of applications coinciding with a declining amount of children available for adoption. CCAA predicts that the wait from LID to referral will stabilize around 11-12 months. (Note from Kathryn: This clearly has not happened, but perhaps it will in time.) CCAA does not believe that the wait ever will be as short as it once was. Families that apply for adoption in China will have to expect and accept the longer wait.
CCAA and the provinces are looking into the possibility of educating and licensing more orphanages for IA (International Adoption). Preparations and investigations are going on right now. CCAA is also reviewing the qualification rules for adoption applicants and will give out more info when this is finished. (Note from Kathryn: They have recently updated their "preferences" for adoptive families, which will decrease the pool of applicants, but these changes come too late to impact our wait.)
The number of in-country (national) adoptions in China are growing, which CCAA is positive about. There are no official statistics, but these adoptions far outnumber the international adoptions. (Note from Kathryn: I've read that the rules governing domestic adoption in China have been eased, and also that as the country becomes more prosperous, more people can afford to adopt and/or pay the fines associated with having more than one child.) The number of abandoned children in China is decreasing, due to the positive economic development that is taking place right now. However, the population in China is huge, and therefore it is believed that International Adoptions will be necessary for a long time to come.
(Note from Kathryn: This point forward is the writer sharing her own observations and insights.) Some orphanages do have less babies than they’ve had in a long time. This seems to be especially true in areas with economic prosperity. However, there are sadly many stories of orphanages that are full. Very full. We don’t know for sure why there are less "paper-ready" babies. There appear to still be plenty of babies in orphanages, but for whatever reason they are not being made available for the IA program. (Note from Kathryn: "Paper-ready" refers to the babies that are available for adoption vs. all abandoned babies in China. No one outside China understands what's going when it comes to this. People mainly speculate that it's a result of China not wanting the rest of the world to know the extent of their problem, and so they only adopt out a certain number of children to other countries. Of course it could also be that the demand for domestic adoption is growing so rapidly that they're anticipating finding homes for all the remaining children -- let's hope that's the case.)
Some of the babies are not eligible for legal reasons. The paper trail from initial discovery after abandonment until they arrive in the orphanage must meet certain criteria or the child will not be legally able to be placed into the IA program. This is to make sure that babies who are placed internationally were truly abandoned.
(Note from Kathryn: This next part is in response to someone stating that there are many less babies available for adoption.) Sorry Brian, I’ve had too many people return from China and email me information about orphanages. Some are returning to orphanages that they visited when they originally adopted their child, and there are more babies there now than there were several years ago. And they are not all SN (special needs), only a small percentage are SN.
Some return to orphanages and discover that an orphanage that had 100 babies a couple of years ago now has 30, and 20 of them are SN - it does happen that way. But there are plenty of orphanages that are overflowing. And there are orphanage directors who complain that the CCAA will not let them send much paperwork in for their babies. I don’t understand it, but I have too many emails with specifics to ignore it. (end of web comments)
* * * * * * There are so many unknowns -- just please say a prayer that beyond all the bureaucracy, our little girl is well cared for and loved, that someone picks her up when she cries and feeds her when she's hungry, and maybe even rocks her, talks to her and smiles at her -- and that if there is no one there, somewhere within her little spirit she knows she's coming home to us and that she will be loved forever. May she wait peacefully.
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