Q & A: Session 4 (a.k.a. Twenty Simple Steps to Intercountry Adoption)

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"Gwen, do you know which children you are going to adopt? When will you find out?"

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Sadly, "finding" our children comes closer to the end of the process than the beginning. Here's the order of events, as I understand them:

1. Registration with provincial agency (our agency, located in Victoria, is Choices Adoption and Counselling.)
2. Submit about three thousand documents (including autobiographies, medical forms, criminal record checks and Interpol fingerprinting)
   
3. Begin education on Transracial Adoption issues.
   
4. Attend Adoption Education Seminar for pre-adoption education about attachment, loss, transracial issues, grief and adjustment.
   
5. Home Study (approx. 3 months: meeting with a Social Worker to assess our suitability for adoptive parenting) (We are in the middle of the Home Study right now, with an estimated completion date at the end of November.)
6. Registration with Ethiopian facilitator (This is an adoption agency in Ontario, called Imagine Adoption.)
   
7. Preparation of dossier, and gathering of further documents, including Marriage Certificate, proof of life insurance, a letter to the Ethiopian Ministry of Women's Affairs, Notice of Assessment from Revenue Canada, etc. Dossier is forwarded to Imagine Adoption for translation.
   
8. Dossier is sent to Ottawa to Foreign Affairs and the Ethiopian Embassy for authentication and legalization.
   
9. Application to Citizenship and Immigration Canada, to begin the process of applying for Citizenship for our two (unnamed) children.
10. Dossier is sent to the orphanage in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where two children will be matched with our family.
11. We wait...... We are expecting a wait of about 24 months for this step alone.
    
12. Once two children have been matched, we will receive a Proposal for the children -- they will send us an email with photos of the children, and whatever information they have about the children.
    
13. We accept the proposed children!
14. We get Yellow Fever vaccinations in preparation for travel. (I believe we can avoid anti-malaria medication.)
15. We wait for a court date, to determine if our children will be awarded Canadian Citizenship. The wait for a court date could be several months.
    
16. The children's Citizenship applications will be submitted to the High Commission in Nairobi, Kenya.
17. Upon court decision, the children's travel documents will be sent to the Agency in Addis Ababa.
    
18. At last! We will travel to Addis Ababa to meet our new children. Our stay in Ethiopia will be approximately ten to fourteen days.
    
19. Return to Canada with our new children..... and then the real work of bonding, attachment and adjustment begins.
20. Social Worker completes three post-placement reports, at 5, 8 and 12 months following the adoption; after the first year, we will submit annual updates to Imagine Adoption, complete with photographs of our new children in our family.

So there they are... 20 simple steps to an expanded family. Easy as pie or what?