Flurry of Activity and Adoption 101

What an amazing few days in the Rwanda adoption program!

As of today, there are 9 families that I know of that have received their approvals! In case you don't know what that means, it means their families have been approved to adopt from Rwanda. About two months after you receive your approval, you receive your referral, which is when you see your child's beautiful face and their name! More on that in a minute...

So the adoption process goes like this:
I. Paperwork phase, including home study. This is when you gather all kinds of paper and get it notarized, certified, and authenticated. You meet with a social worker on several occasions and they find out all sorts of things about you. :)

II. Submit all of this paperwork, called a dossier, to your agency, who then makes sure everything is in order. The Rwandan Embassy in DC then looks everything over, translates all pertinent information, and sends a letter of non-objection!

III. Dossier is sent to Rwanda. You follow the tracking number like a mad woman. Once it arrives, you are officially DTR, which means Dossier To Rwanda.

IV. Now, you wait. You wait for Approval. The ballpark for this wait is 3-6 months. During this time, the people in Rwanda are working hard to read all that paperwork!

V. Once you receive your approval, you wait for your referral. In your approval letter, it is explained that it will be around two months until your referral comes through. During this two months, the people in Rwanda are trying hard to match your family to a child. They are praying over each one! What a gift! Your referral is when you receive a picture of your beautiful child and their name! The day you have been waiting for!

VI. You are assigned a court date, about four weeks after your referral. The court decides if this referred child will actually become a part of your family! This is a huge day.

VII. Travel! From what I hear, this happens around two weeks after court.

Now, the amazing thing about these nine families is that many of them have been waiting since June for their approvals. They were the families who had waited the longest of anyone--over five months!
Things pretty much go in chronological order so things had really come to a stand still with no one hearing anything. This saddened us all, and made me take a step back and not expect ANYTHING any time soon.

But, when the families received their approvals over the Thanksgiving weekend, many of the letters were dated in September! Which means that had been approved in the time frame that they were expecting, but just hadn't been notified! So lots of emails had been sent to inform everyone about the approvals. What great news!

But this morning brought even better news, as many of these families received their referrals this morning! The two months between the approval and the referral had already passed, since the letters had actually been written in September, they just didn't know it!

How great is that? That's like finding out you are pregnant when you go into labor. I've always been jealous of those women. Approvals and referrals within two days of each other! WOW!