Our Adoption Adventure

---

We first began considering adoption from China in the mid-1990s, after we saw a documentary on the Chinese policy of only one child. We had our first biological child in 1985, and as our family grew in size, we continued to think about it. Four children later, with our oldest in college and our youngest in sixth grade, we felt God leading us to adopt a child, and attended an adoption seminar in April of 2005. We prayed about it, and had our children do the same. Finally, in May of 2005, our whole family, made the prayerful decision that we should adopt from China.

We applied to America World Adoption Agency, the same one used by Mary Beth and Steven Curtis Chapman to adopt their three Chinese children. We received our acceptance letter from AWAA on June 8, 2005. Then the long "paper chase" began, including criminal records checks, fingerprinting, and other detailed records, all of which needed to be notarized. A Home Study had to be requested and completed. This process, begun earnestly in late June, took until October 12, which was when our Home Study was completed and sent to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, from which we needed to receive our final piece of paper -- the long awaited Form I-171H, which finally arrived in our hands on December 5, 2005.

Now the final part of the paperchase began -- getting all our notarized documents authenticated by the NC State Department, the US State Department, and the Chinese Embassy. Instead of "fedexing" all these documents around, I and my good friend, John Wilkie, took December 12 and 13 to drive these documents from Weddington to Raleigh, NC, and then on to Washington, DC. I must say, despite what views you may have on some of government agencies, these three were very easy to work with, and very speedy in handling the authentication process. It took 30 minutes to get our documents authenticated in Raleigh and Washington, and about 3 minutes to drop them off with the Chinese representatives. So on Dec. 13, John and I left our precious 13 documents with the Chinese Embassy, which takes 4 days to authenticate (unless you want to pay an additional $30 per document rush charge).

On Monday, Dec. 19, our documents arrived in Weddington from the Chinese Embassy! We now had everything together to send to AWAA, who then puts together our Dossier to send to China. I fedexed our documents to AWAA on Dec. 20, and our Dossier was sent on December 23 (our Dossier To China (DTC) date), and was delivered there on December 26. Now we are waiting to hear our actual Log In Date -- LID -- the date the Chinese actually begin to work through our documentation. We are in AWAA Group 246.

Occasionally during the last few months we've bantered back and forth about names, but haven't settled on any as of yet. We plan to pick out a new first name, and then use a Chinese name for the middle name. Many times the children in the Chinese orphanages are named for the location or surroundings they are found in, and then given the last name of the orphanage, or the orphanage director. We still have several months to go before we'll travel over to China to pick up our new girls -- we expect to travel in very late summer.

---

Comments

[Hans]

You are a blessed family
Having visited China this past summer, I had many first hand experiences seeing and understanding the one-child policy of China. I was interviewing with a Teachers College near Shanghai, and my visit permitted me, as their single guest, to interact directly with the families and friends one on one. During my visit I saw no Western face, and I travelled through very rural areas of Central and South China. The one-child policy is more strongly enforced with the Hun Chinese. For minority groups and families in the country side, the law permits an additional child, especially when giving birth to a girl first. The attention lavished on their "little emperor" by the extendet family is total and committed and obvious. I did find great support for the one-child policy everywhere I travelled and whenever I engaged in frank conversation. No one was timid in their response. It was not my place to judge such a policy, but the choice of hunger, poverty, and lack of housing remembered by all in very recent Chinese history, over restriction of births seemed to be a rational choice to them. They pointed to India as an example. What the consequences of this policy will be in the future can only be debated for now. I look forward to observing this experiment for a longer period of time starting in May ,06. I applaud your sacrifice for a child in need of care and love. It is not for us to judge the rejection by the parent, but be honored by the opportunity to share a loving family and home. It will be its own reward. I remember someone saying once: "What you do to the least of my children, you do unto me." You might enjoy reading my travelblog about my China travels at: www.Travelblog.org/Bloggers/Hans I hope your family will always be blessed, Hans Schneider