Sunday, December 21, 2008

Update on adoption front

Some of you have asked about our adoption efforts, and I really, genuinely appreciate your interest and concern. Sadly there's not much to report. We started the home study process and are nearly complete with that and that's about the only good news there is to share.

We really wanted to adopt in Brazil as this will likely be the place we live the longest in Jimmy's diplomatic career. As some of you know, the United States signed the Hague Convention on international adoption last December and ratified the convention (or whatever you do with a convention) in April. Brazil has also signed the Hague Convention, so it seems like it should be really easy to process an international adoption between the two countries. So much for my thinking on that matter.

The United States has Hague-accredited a long list of American adoption agencies and now Brazil has to choose a few of those that we Americans will use who want to adopt in Brazil. Seems easy enough, right? Well the meeting to discuss these agencies has been scheduled and postponed at least 4 times that I know of since October. Now it's Christmas time and not too much gets done in Brazil between Christmas and Carnival (end of February), so I'm not hopeful that the meeting will happen until sometime after February, which means there will continue to be NO adoptions by Americans in Brazil.

The psychologist who is doing our home study was confident as late as Thanksgiving that we still had time to adopt in Brazil given our departure next summer even with these delayed meetings. But I have just heard from her and she now believes this nonsense could drag on indefinitely. She has decided to assist in adoptions only in non-Hague countries and wanted to tell us that. Our home study could still be used for a Hague country adoption, but, for instance, if we decided to try for Brazil, we'd have to present our home study to one of these agencies that eventually Brazil will one day approve and that agency would review the home study and hopefully be able to use it.

And actually the same process will still happen if we go with a non-Hague country - we'll select an agency in the US to help us and they'll use the home study that we're nearing completion on.

In a big step forward, yesterday I contacted an adoption agency in the US that our friends, the Schnabels, used to adopt their girls from Ethiopia. As it's the weekend, I won't hear from anybody until tomorrow (hopefully they're working even though it's Christmas week), but we are moving forward and will now try to adopt in a non-Hague country. Ethiopia is our first choice.

At this point there wouldn't be much difference going Hague or non-Hague for us because we have decided Brazil is out of the running. The real reason we've decided to go non-Hague is because we'd have to get a police report from every place we've ever lived in since we were something like 18. That's fine for places like Columbia, South Carolina, but Maputo, Mozambique? It sounds so difficult that I can't even contemplate how you go about getting that done.

So we press on. The thing that makes me maddest and saddest in all this is that I know there are thousands of children in orphanages here in Brazil that are waiting to be adopted and because of bureaucratic nonsense, they're going to stay in orphanages longer instead of being placed with decent families who can provide them a home. It's infuriating but we can't beat our heads against a brick wall when we can find another wall that's a little softer, a little more accommodating and a little more willing to be knocked down.

I'll keep you posted as events develop!

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