Meeting with CONANI

It's been 7 months since my last blog post.  Not much has happened.  We decided in June to change the requested age of the child we hope to adopt from 0-4 years of age to 3-5 years of age.  This required an updated homestudy and request to make changes to our I-800 approval through USCIS which cost around $500.  It was a fairly quick change that took less than a month.  Inna, our adoption counselor in the US spoke to representatives from CONANI and they felt this should help to make our wait shorter.  In August we reached out to Inna to get any news and since she had none for us, we asked if there was any way we could set up a meeting with someone at CONANI.  She arranged this for us which was really great.

So on August 10th, we met with them promptly at 10:30 via Facetime.  On the call was our attorney representing us in the DR and a member of the legal team from CONANI.  We were very impressed by both of them.  They were attentive, seemed to care and did their best to answer our questions.  They told us that the wait was usually 3 years, but since our updated age, it was likely that we would be matched a few months before that.  So, they told us that it would probably be another year.  Our heart sunk at this.  They said there were around 3,000 children up for adoption, and CONANI was responsible for the adoptions of about 300 of them while NGOs in the Dominican Republic handled the rest of them.  They asked about the timeline for our adoption in India.  We explained that our daughter would need another surgery soon and that the times of being matched and her surgery might coincide.  Sometimes, it is hard to keep faith that the adoption will happen.  We have almost no sense of how the adoption matching process works over there or the experience of other families.   We feel anxious about all of this.  But we still feel very good about the program in the Dominican Republic.

So, we will continue to plug along and wait.  We considered looking into other programs, but then we would have to start from scratch again.  So in the meantime, we can only dream about our child and traveling to the Dominican Republic.  I have found a Dominican teacher who lives in Santo Domingo who is helping me learn Spanish as well as educate me on Dominican culture.  We meet via video chat once a week.  I explained to him that the bad news is that it will be another year before we are matched, but the good news is that I will have plenty more time to work on my Spanish.  He thought that was very funny.  And so it goes...I spoke with Inna today and she told me that she asked the representative from CONANI what is the longest an adoption has taken and he said 3 years. So maybe this latest news of "one more year", might actually be close to right.  The most important part of adopting is keeping faith that the adoption will actually happen and that the exact perfect child for your family will come into your lives at exactly the right time for your family.  That's definitely what happened with our first adoption and we truly hope for a second child.

Update:  Upon communicating further with the attorney at CONANI, we found out there are 190 national and international families in front of us.  It seems like a lot, but this includes people with different requests than us.  So far now, we are letting things rest and going back to our lives until we check in again in February.

One Year Later = One Year More

February marked the one year point from when our adoption dossier was submitted to CONANI to adopt a child from the Dominican Republic.  At that time, we expected the wait to be a year to a year and a half.  In February, we called our adoption counselor, Inna to get an update.  Unfortunately, the only news she had for us was that she expected the wait to probably be another year, so now we are looking at maybe Spring of 2019.  In a way, it is better for us as we will have a bit more time to save money, but it is also frustrating.  We have no idea of how many other families there are waiting ahead of us or what the hold up is.  Inna informed us that most of the children available for intercountry adoption are actually from Haiti and two things must occur in order for those children to be eligible for adoption.  First, Dominican citizenship must be established and then all efforts to adopt the child to a Dominican family must be tried, which usually involves rejection from 3 Dominican families before a child is eligible for intercountry adoption.    We are happy to adopt a child of either Dominican or Haitian decent.  We would really just love to have a second child and a sibling for our daughter.  We feel we have the resources and the desire to raise another child in our home.  We had to get our homestudy updated and our USCIS approval extended, so we have until April 2019 before we will need to get matched without any further updates or expenses.  So we wait, but life goes on and we keep ourselves busy.  I have been studying Spanish and enjoying it a lot.  Even before this adoption, I've always wanted to learn Spanish, so it is fun for me.

For this adoption, I have been much more patient.  Maybe it's because the promise of motherhood has already been fulfilled with our daughter Anjali, or the second time around, you just understand that things always take longer than expected.  Ultimately, I feel that a child will come into our lives when the time is right and as they say in espanol, vale todo- it's  all worth it!  You are worth the wait, my child!