Stahlke Adoption

Update on Ukrainian adoption

Well, my resolve to write every day was severely challenged the last two weeks. I won't give you all the details, which would take way too long, but I'll talk about a few things in the coming days. But this morning, I had an important conversation that I'd like to tell you about:

I talked by phone with Darlene, our social worker at Lutheran Social Services of New England, and she gave me an update on the adoption system in Ukraine. As I mentioned in a previous post, Ukrainian adoption (formerly administered by the National Adoption Center or NAC) closed in 2005 because the adoption bureaucracy was being moved from one ministry of the government to another. They reopened in late January 2007 as the State Department for Adoption or SDA, and immediately started receiving lots and lots of dossiers from facilitators (which makes sense, since they had been closed for 1-1/2 years). Before long they closed again for a month to come up with a different system for receiving dossiers. This new system is described in two letters from the Ukrainian government which are posted on the US Embassy (Kiev) website:
kiev.usembassy.gov/amcit_adoptions_notice_0305_eng.html
kiev.usembassy.gov/amcit_adoptions_notice_0326_eng.html
Another reason for the closure in February was that the Ukrainian parliament has drafted more legislation concerning adoption, and the SDA had to sort out how these changes affect their procedures. None of the new laws apply to us; for example, Ukraine will no longer allow single parents to adopt, and the age differential between the child and the parents must now be 45 years or less.

Some of the main points of the new system for submitting dossiers:
It applies only to foreign adoption, and requires that the dossiers are submitted in person either by the parents or their representatives with powers of attorney. (I believe that formerly dossiers could be mailed or dropped off.) Only one dossier can be submitted per appointment, and an entire day each week has been reserved for appointments with U.S. facilitators. All dossiers are submitted in folders, and the U.S. folders must be red. The number of dossiers that will be accepted this year from the U.S. is 558. The U.S. tops the list of countries, with Italy second at 494 dossiers and Spain third at 380. This number is based on the average number of adoptions to each country in the last five years, adjusted for other factors including the compliance rate for post-adoption reporting.

(Every family who adopts from Ukraine is required to submit yearly reports about their children to the Ukrainian government. Ukraine feels very strongly about these reports, and the poor compliance rate by adoptive parents has been one of the reasons for adoption reform in Ukraine.)

Darlene told me that our facilitator Masha has our dossier ready to submit, which means that all her translation work is done. She hopes to schedule an appointment for this Friday for one of two LSS dossiers that are ready. There are only a limited number of appointment times on any given day, however, and all facilitators for US parents are competing for those slots. Darlene didn't know if Masha hoped to submit our dossier first or the other one.

As for the timing after submission, Darlene has heard from other agencies that it takes approximately six weeks for the SDA to process dossiers and determine an appointment date for the parents. (This assumes, of course, that all the paperwork has been completed correctly.) The timing between notification of an appointment and the parents' travel date is usually an additional six to eight weeks. So if our dossier went in this Friday and needed no revisions, we would probably travel in July.
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As you know from my previous post on 3/14, waiting is hard, especially when you don't know how long. We got some answers today--still uncertain, but a little clearer. That helps.

posted by Stahlkes @ 9:49 AM