It's Time

As pretty much everyone has heard, the time we've been waiting for came totally out of the blue. Ilana, our social worker, rang us early last week. She had news that a baby boy, Min-wu was waiting for us in Korea. He's 6 months old, just newly eligible for adoption and he's ours! He also has a half sister in Long Beach which is just icing on the cake. His sister's family wanted to be sure we'd be open to having a relationship with them, which of course we are and we're anxious to get to know them. Unfortunately that part can't happen until we finish a mound of paperwork which we are diligently working on at the moment.

So Henry Min-wu McKeon will hopefully be home within 4-6 months, as quickly as we can push through his visa paperwork. In the meantime he is with a foster family in Korea. We are so thankful for the love they are giving him while we are working hard to bring him home and thinking of him every moment.

There's a lot to do between now and then of course but we're thankful to all our friends and family for their support, well wishes, advice and everything in between. It truly does take a village.

Parenting Class

We went to a "parenting" class this weekend but it wasn't your typical how to change a diaper or swaddle or whatever most parents learn to do in their hospital parenting classes. Instead, this was on the 30th floor of a high-rise in downtown LA, in the conference room of a fancy-shamancy law firm. We were one of 3 couples meeting over fresh bagels and coffee to discuss raising adopted children of interracial families. Most interestingly was the make-up of the group: we were coincidentally all adopting from Korea, Tim and I were the only white couple, another was half white (Australian) half Korean (she moved to the US when she was 11) and the third couple was Korean-American.
Mostly we talked about the delicate balance of attempting to provide information about Korean culture without, at least in the case of Tim and me, feeling like a bit of a fraud, since it's not as though we'd typically dress in hanbok. We want to provide a gateway while realizing we're very much learning ourselves. I was a bit relived to find the Korean-American couple didn't do all the "traditonal" Korean fare for their first son like the big first birthday celebration. "http://www.lifeinkorea.com/culture/tol/tol.cfm"Granted, every family finds their own way but seeing as this couple is surrounded by grandparents who I would expect would insist upon Korean tradition and yet don't it made the pressure to figure out what I do an don't need to blend into our American cutlture seem a little less intimidating. I certainly want to intruduce Korean culture to our child but it seems more for the adults than the baby to do it at such a young age. I have this feeling no mattter what we do, a family vacation to Korean, Korean BBQ nights and weekends with our adoptive family network I hope I can just do a good job of helping my child figure out who they are, not as a Korean, or as an American but just as themselves. However, having said that, it may be easy, living in a white society and being white, to not realize how much race and culture do play a factor. So that's where my job, our job, as parents come in.

Korea

It's finally official. It's been a long time since there's been an update because there's been a big change to our adoption plans and it's not something to just casually discuss. After much consideration we have switched our adoption from China to Korea due to the extensive wait in China. What had begun as a year and a half to potentially 2 year time line has now stretched to an unpredictable amount of time. So that being said we began to explore other options and moving our adoption to the Korea program once we as a family qualified for it, made sense.

The Korean guidelines differed from China in that we needed to be married for 3 years versus the 2 years required by China. For us we hit this milestone on September 4th. We met with our social worker this past week to update our home study and officially switched our paperwork over to begin again. Although we're very excited there is of course an element of sadness and frustration. But parenthood demands flexibility and this is just the beginning on our road of the unexpected.

Now that we have officially begun the process with our agency of participation with the Korean adoption program we are as eager as all of you to know when we will be matched with our child. According to Holt, our agency, it will take approximately 11 months once our home study is completed to be matched. Once we are matched with a baby it will take approximately 4-6 months for our paper work and the baby's paperwork to be processed for us to fly to Korea and bring the baby home.

The baby will be approximately 5 months old at family match. All children are fostered by a family and therefore are not in orphanage care which is excellent for early child development.

So now we wait for our home study to be submitted, we finish a few forms ourselves and wait...

The Earthquake in Sichuan

On the afternoon of Monday, May 12, 2008, a massive earthquake, measuring 7.8 on the Richter Scale, rocked China. The epicenter was Wenchuan County, Sichuan, northwest of Chengdu.

Chengdu - The city's Qingyan Sports Center has become a relief camp. The young mom (red coat) received special assistance from the army to reach the camp with her 16 day-old baby. The baby was born in Yingxiu and lost her father in the earthquake when she was only 11 days old. There are many children living in the Qingyan camp who've not yet been reunited with their parents. Most are teenagers. Children in the primary schools and kindergartens more often did not survive as they were napping when the earthquake struck.



SHIFANG, SICHUAN
As many as 40,000 children are in need of shelter and care. Their schools and homes destroyed, high school-age survivors are trying desperately to study for their all-important school exams, which take place across China in early June. The government and national and international aid organizations are providing tents and basic necessities as much as possible.





CHENGDU CHILDREN'S WELFARE INSTITUTION
The surviving children are all well. They all sleep on the first floor of the children's building and, for their safety, are kept outside during their waking hours. Due to recent severe aftershocks, the Children's Welfare Institute is now preparing to move children to tents.




HANZHONG COUNTY SOCIAL WELFARE INSTITUTION, SHAANXI
Cracked walls and a crumbling foundation forced the children and caregivers of this small orphanage close to the Sichuan border to take shelter in tents. All are reported to be fine.



Today marks three-days of national mourning for the tens of thousands of people killed - may China begin to heal and rebuild.

How It All Works

I've been repeatedly asked to explain how the adoption process works so here's my attempt to break it down:

The Paperchase
To adopt a child from China a family must gather certain paperwork, called a dossier and submit it through their agency to the CCAA (China Center for Adoption Affairs) in China. The paperwork consists of birth certificates, a home study report, as well as fingerprinting, medical approvals and background checks, financial paperwork and immigration approval. All the paperwork is then authenticated at the local, state and federal level and then as a last step must also pass through the Chinese embassy for approval. Once all of this is completed, a family’s American agency will review the paperwork and send it off to China (also know as DTC or dossier to China). When the CCAA receives the dossier a log-in date (LID) will be assigned. The “paper chasing” portion of the process takes anywhere from 5-12 months to complete. At this point the family will wait for a match with a child. Right now we are waiting and waiting and waiting.

The Match
The CCAA will review the dossier and will match us to a child. We then will be sent a photo of her with as much information as they have. We are specifically requesting a healthy infant girl between 0-12 months: as young as possible or sibling twin girls. She may be anywhere from 6 months to 15 months old, since the Chinese believe a 15 month old is still an infant. Once a baby is abandoned it takes 6 months to declare the baby legally abandoned in China. The Chinese newspapers post a “found list” with the baby’s picture and information such as where the little girl was abandoned. The Chinese government attempts to find the parents or other biological relatives before placing the child up for adoption. Most of the babies are around 10-12 months at the time of referral. The referral will hopefully include some general information about her personality and interests. It will also include her age and where in China she is located, if she is in an orphanage or living with a foster family. Upon acceptance of our daughter, we will be given travel approval from China and expected to travel within 6 to 8 weeks post referral. The wait time from dossier completion to child referral is somewhat unpredictable, right now the wait is at 30 months and we are just hoping it doesn’t continue to extend. It will be an exciting day when we get our first pictures of our daughter sent from the CCAA.


The Travel
Our travel will take approximately 10-14 days. We will fly first to Beijing or Hong Kong to tour and learn about the country. Then we will meet up with our travel group and travel to the province in China where our daughter lives. We expect to be united with our daughter the 1st day or 2nd day after we arrive in her province. We will spend 4-5 days in the province processing much of the Chinese adoption paperwork. After finishing our paperwork within the province, we will travel to Guangzhou, China where the US Consulate is located. Here we will process our daughters’ US VISA and passport and she will have a medical exam which typically consists of a lot of crying children during a hearing exam.

As you can imagine we are filled with excitement and anticipation as we travel this journey to our daughter. We encourage you to follow along with us and share in this exciting time.

China's Very Complicated One Child Policy

There has been a lot of discussion and various news articles recently published about the one child policy, and I’ve certainly stayed away from the subject here.

There are two reasons I’ve stayed away, the first being that it’s a very complex issue and there is no way to say whether doing away with it would be a good or bad thing for China or the world. Certainly, the policy is harsh, particularly on women and on female children.

And the second is that it makes me very uncomfortable to hear people who are in the process of an adoption freak out about the news stories. I try to take solace in the belief that China should do what is best for her people. The idea that people might want this kind of policy to stay in place in order to make sure babies make it into orphanages is just mind boggling. It makes my head and heart hurt. So, I’ll stay away from that and go back to my first reason.

Let’s look back in history for a bit to understand why the policy was put in place to begin with. After years of food shortages and people literally starving to death, the country was finally able to feed most everyone. But the government looked ahead and realized that if families continued having lots of kids that in another decade or two there would (again) not be enough food to feed everyone. Realize that in the late fifties and early sixties it is estimated that between 20 and 43 million people in China died of starvation. In some areas one out of every four people died of starvation. Imagine 16 of your friends and family, with four of them dead to starvation and you perhaps not far from it.

So, in the late 70’s when the one birth policy was put in place, it was done so in part to keep the population from exploding back to what it had been when there wasn’t enough food to feed everyone. This is a bit simplified of course since there was more at work during the famine than just population, but it’s a complicated subject and I’m trying to do this in a few paragraphs.

If you’ve visited China then you know that there is plenty of food now. Well, there may be some shortages right now because the winter storms disrupted the crops, but in general terms, if you have the money to buy food, there is affordable food to buy.

But now the government is having to deal with a reality where there are enough people who can afford to pay the fines for more than one child that it has become noticeable. And those who can’t afford to pay the fines are justifiably upset. There are the families seen in fancy hotel elevators all well dressed and toting three kids. Walk around the areas where the rich shop and you’ll see families with more than one child. But go out into the countryside and you will mostly only see families with one child. Now there is some bitterness, where there was not before.

The government is looking for a solution to this, and has begun putting political pressure as well as the threat of fines to keep their wealthy people limited as well.

And, they are starting to put out hints that they are reconsidering the law. Some argue this won't happen any time soon. And even if they do change it, my guess is that there will still be restrictions in place, they’ll just loosen it even more than it has already been loosened. It hasn’t been the “one child policy” for a long time. First, it’s really the “one birth policy” since twins and triplets are okay. And second, there are now many ways to legally have more than one child without paying fines. In some areas if your first child is a girl you get one more chance, though if your first child is a boy then you are done. Also, two only-children parents are allowed to have two kids, no matter the gender of the first.

But, back to our discussion of the ramification of taking the one child policy away. Let’s shift directions.


OK, let's look at look at land.

As of November 2005, China had approximately 301.5 million acres of farmable land. The United States had 470 million acres of farmable land in 2001 (can’t find anything more recent) China has less farmable land than the U.S.

If China’s population starts exponentially increasing then in today's global market we could be looking at worldwide food shortages. Under Mao’s reign they didn’t look outside the country for food. But in today’s market they’d get it from wherever they could, at whatever price it was offered.

China has population disparity. Without seeing it for yourself, I think it’s hard to get it across. When trying to explain what it was like to go to a market apparently it's like a store in the U.S. the day before Christmas. Every day. And the traffic? Like the traffic around the mall the day before Christmas. Every day.

The Chinese government will do what is best for China. The one child policy is harsh, and cruel and sad. But the alternative could, in the long run, also be harsh, and cruel, and sad.

As I said, I haven’t talked about it because it is a complex issue. When I think of the people in China then I’d love for them to be able to have a huge family as a basic human right. But, when I think of the overall effect of this happening across China, I’m actually pretty glad I’m not the one making that decision.

The equitable decision would probably be for the rest of the planet to also be responsible with how many children we bring into the world. But I doubt that will be happening any time soon. And, again, I’m glad I’m not in a place to have to make such a decision.

China's Stolen Children - A Documentary

There's a new documentary released in the UK called China's Stolen Children. It follows ten years after the policy-changing and award-winning film, The Dying Rooms, the same team returns to a very different China where the infamous One Child Policy has had the horrific side effect of a boom in stolen children.

With extraordinary access to devastated parents desperately searching for their stolen son; a man who brokers the deals and has sold his own offspring; and prospective parents grappling with giving up their soon-to-be-born daughter through lack of options, we are brought face to face with the crisis that such a stringent government policy has created among China's poorest people.

This film takes us into the heart of modern China, a place where girl babies are being sold for 3,000-4,000 RMB ($450-$550); detectives specialise in finding kidnapped children; and child traffickers are so relaxed about the trade they ply, that they allow the film-makers to covertly record them buying and selling tiny human lives. Tens of thousands of children are now kidnapped and traded on the black market whilst the State is more concerned with keeping the story quiet than tracing Chinas stolen children.

Why is this happening? Clare Dwyer Hogg from the Observer outlines it well:

A root cause of such large numbers of children being snatched is the fact that having a son in China is a necessity. He carries the family name, he is the child who will provide for his parents as they age. A daughter will leave the family to marry into another name, passively obliterating her own family line and leaving her relatives without the assurance of help in old age. The One Child Policy - which Save The Children calls a 'mass, live experiment in family life which is unique in the history of the world' - has resulted in prohibitive family-planning laws in China: prospective parents must have a birth permit before conceiving, and while rural families are allowed a second child if their first is a girl, urban families must pay a fine for flouting the one-child rule. And if you haven't had an abortion to get rid of your female child (although it is now illegal, around 40m girls have been selectively aborted since the One Child Policy was instituted in 1979), how can you be sure to get a son? Sometimes the only choice seems to be to buy a stolen child, gender already determined.

Here is the youtube link:
http://www.youtube. com/watch? v=b9YdA3WSiPM

How The Matching Room Works

I found the below from someone else's blog. I have to admit I find it a bit convoluted but if you can follow along it's pretty interesting.

I have enclosed a copy of "How the Matching Room works" in this journal page. Right now rumors are that CCAA (Chinese Center of Adoption Affairs) is in the Matching Room.

How the Matching Room works:

First, they review the children’s dossiers and make sure there are no issues with them. We are told that they then count up all of the children’s dossiers that are eligible for matching that month and then look to see how far this stack will go in the parent dossiers without sending out a partial day, and they pull all of those parent files. That is the likely cut-off date. Sometimes something happens and they don’t get this far. Sometimes something happens and they get farther.
Next they match orphanages up with agencies. This orphanage has six children, this agency has six families. These two orphanages are in the same province and have a total of 12 children, this agency has 12 families. When they are through with this is when (I believe) some agencies start to get information about the cut-off date. Or at least it is when they used to start getting information.
And then they start matching individual children to individual families. At some point during this part of the process most agencies used to hear from their person in the matching room to let them know how many referrals they will be receiving and from what province(s). Some agencies shared this information with their clients. Some chose not to. Recently I’ve gotten the feeling that many agencies are still getting this information but they are being given orders by the CCAA to not share this information with the families.
Just as in the review room, each matcher is assigned certain agencies and is responsible for communicating with their agencies. Some matchers tell their agency the cut-off date, some matchers tell their agency you have X number of referrals arriving, some matchers give their agency a list of that agency’s families that will be receiving a referral. And some matchers don’t say anything at all to their agencies.
The next question that comes up is generally how the matchers match families and children. I’ve heard from several people who have had the opportunity to speak with someone who works in the matching room. The various conversations seem to all agree that they first look for something that stands out: a matching birthday, a child who looks a lot like a parent, or a child who likes music and a parent who teaches music. Several matching people have stated they match by bone structure of the child’s face and the parent’s faces (this is why they need our passport photos, so they can compare our mug shot with the child’s photo). Some have stated that they used Chinese astrology, also. Once they’ve matched the obvious matches they then start to look at things like age of child requested. The age requested is not a priority for them, they feel they are matching families and not filling orders.

The Waiting Game

The wait times are getting a lot longer and I mean a lot longer. At first we were told 24 months now we're being told 36 to referral but I'm thinking it will be longer than that. Of course people around us ask why and I wish as much as the next person that I had an answer but I don't and our agency doesn't either. The CCAA who does the matching has simply slowed down its process and there is no guarantee things will speed up after the Olympics. That is more of a wish than a fact. It could happen, or it might not. What is known is that the CCAA is currently only making it through a couple of days with each batch of LIDS.

A few other possibilites for the increase in wait times may be due to the fact that Russia stopped all adoptions and has required all US agencies to recertify and many people jumped ship and switched to China. Guatemala's system was becoming so corrupt (with documented cases of baby theft) that that country has closed its doors for adoption for now, and again people in that program switched to China. Those factors, plus the growing demand for Chinese babies in a country that is seeing families in the cities now keep their daughters (which is great by the way) now means there are less "orphans".

What people can know for sure is that we hate it more than anyone and can use all the support we can get while we wait. We are in this for the long hall and know in the end we will get the perfect child for us, you'll be one of the first to know when we know something, thank you for your thoughts.

At Long Last - We Have Our LID Date

The date everyone in the world of China adoption goes by is their Log In Date and we got ours today! This is when China officially approves your application to adopt. Our LID date is 12/19/07. We didn't expect to get it so soon but I got an email from Holt that links to DTC and LID dates and ours was the latest posted. So we have approximately 24 months until match from this date but the really hard part is behind us (although waiting is incredibly hard) the question of China approving our documents is now behind us. Yay, Happy Birthday to me!