Continued Progress

Our dossier was quickly sent to Madalaine, the attorney representing us in the Dominican Republic. She took only about a week to translate the documents and submit them to CONANI.  All adoptions go through CONANI which stands for Consejo Nacional para la Niñez y la Adolescencia or National Council for Children and Adolescents.  At this point, CONANI has looked over our documents and determined they are complete, given us a case number and placed us on the waiting list.  From here according to the U.S. State Department Website, the following happens:

• When the PAPs (Prospective Adoptive Parents) turn comes, the Appropriations Committee makes the allocation of future adoptive family to the child.

• CONANI presents the medical and psychological records of the child to the PAPs for evaluation and then sends a copy of the file to the U.S. accredited agency for scrutiny and approval. This approval must be sent in writing to CONANI before starting the stage of socialization. [This is the process in which the PAPs spend time with the child].

• The PAPs must answer in writing to CONANI's Adoption Department Management either accepting or rejecting the child placement.

While it seems pretty straightforward, we are told it will probably be about a year to a year and a half until we are matched with a child.  Why so long?  Hague Convention Countries must do fairly extensive documentation that a child is indeed eligible for adoption. Additionally, in the Dominican Republic, many of the children eligible for adoption are children who were brought over from Haiti and it can be difficult to establish them as Dominicans so they can be adopted through CONANI.Talking with Inna, the director of our adoption agency, I got the sense that we won't really get many updates regarding our place on the waitlist or when we will be matched.  She, however, let us know that she felt really good about the people at CONANI saying they were honest and really seemed to care about the children.  She was able to visit the DR and meet everyone involved with adoption at CONANI.The State Department has some statistics regarding adoption in the Dominican Republic. The charts below are taken from the site to give you an idea of how many adoptions take place each year.

So for now we wait... which is fine.  We feel good about where we are in the process.   We wait excitedly and patiently for that first photo of our child and while it could be sooner than the time frame suggested, we know our child will come when the time is right.