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.