Many of you are curious about the adoption process and flow. I will try to lay it out for you, according to our experiences with adopting right now in Ukraine. The one stable factor is that everything is subject to unexpected change. ;)
The process, in a nutshell:
A. Get U.S. approval to adopt
B. Get Ukraine approval to adopt and receive an SDA appointment
C. Travel, receive a referral to visit a child, commit to adopt a child
D. Receive regional and national approval to adopt the child
E. Have court, wait 10 days for court decree to become official
F. Complete exit paperwork in Ukraine, return home, complete U.S. paperwork.
G. Begin real life...
A. Get U.S. approval to adopt:
First, you should understand something about the Hague Adoption Convention. In 2008 the USA enacted an "international agreement to establish safeguards to ensure that intercountry adoptions take place in the best interests of the child." (see link above)
The Convention governs things like prerequisites for adoption, regulations for adoption agencies, etc. Working with a Hague-affiliated country has many benefits. But not every country wanted to enter into the agreement with the U.S., so last year the United States made a rule that every U.S. adoption had to follow Hague guidelines, whether it was with a Hague-affiliated country or not. The law came into effect just as we were beginning our paperwork.
Ukraine is not a Hague-affiliated country, and it does not recognize any U.S. adoption agencies, but mandates that all Ukrainian adoptions are completed using independent Ukrainian adoption facilitators that have been accredited with their own government. Prior to last year's law change, it was possible to work directly with an independent Ukrainian facilitator and bypass working with a U.S. agency.
After the law, people weren't sure what would happen with Ukraine. The U.S. said that we had to use U.S. approved agencies and Ukraine said that it wouldn't allow such in their country. After a few months, the U.S. made an exception and allowed people to use Ukrainian facilitators as long a everything else was overseen by a U.S. agency. "Oversight" has added some increased surveillance and mandated that Ukrainian facilitators that want to work with U.S. families must jump through more hoops than before, but people who want to adopt from Ukraine and not pay extra agency fees are finding ways to keep agency involvement at a minimum.
Initially we thought we would pursue the route of working with a facilitator and avoid having to sign on with an agency. It seemed cheaper and we were made aware of a really great facilitator that had an incredible U.S. counterpart person that had helped hundreds of families. However, we began our paperwork in the interim between the U.S. law coming into effect and the law changing to accommodate Ukraine's unique situation. At the time it looked like our only option was to sign on with a U.S. agency if we meant to move forward.
So we did a lot of searching and praying and found an agency that felt right. I wouldn't have chosen them for their website, which was old and needed updating (it is being updated now) or for any other rational reason except that it felt like the right path. This is the way of adoption. You aren't always sure why certain pathways are important, but when they are, you know it and you move forward in faith.
Just before we paid our case management fees to our agency, and began our partnership with them, the law changed to allow us to use the independent group we had found before, but we felt like we should stay put. We began the journey.
The first step is to receiving U.S. approval to adopt is to get a Homestudy completed. This involves having a U.S. accredited social worker determine that your family and home is a good place for an adopted child. In order to do so, they have to do extensive background checks, receive information about all of your financial endeavors, hear from at least 6 references on a number of topics, and complete in-house interviews and inspections. This process usually takes a few months and can cost anywhere from $1000 to $3500. Your social worker must also be affiliated with a Hague-accredited U.S. adoption agency.
I will list what I remember doing. (Keep in mind that different states and social workers may require different things):
1. Everyone who was older than 14 needed a state background check. For us this meant scheduling appointments for five of us (mostly at different times because everyone wasn't available all at once) and then driving 20 minutes to the place to get them done. Once we forgot the appropriate identifying paperwork and had to abort those appointments and set up some new ones for another day two weeks later. That was frustrating, but the process is like that. $25 each.
2. Ben and I also needed a federal background check. For the Homestudy this was a simple check and was done digitally at a UPS store and the results were emailed to us that day. $50 each.
3. Each person in the family needed to be checked by a doctor and receive a TB test. Ben and I needed additional checks and tests. That meant setting up seven appointments (plus extra ones for the children to get their skin TB tests read). Thankfully our insurance just required copays on these.
4. We needed to ask six close friends (two could be family) to complete a series questions about our family. The social worker supplied the form and it came out to about three pages when completed. These were to be sent to our social worker.
5. Ben and I needed background checks from everywhere we had lived since we were 18. Three different states for me and three states and two countries for Ben! This was particularly trying because Ben served a mission for the Lord in Chile for two years and getting the paperwork from Chile turned out to be very difficult. Our social worker couldn't talk to the people at the Consulate very well to describe what was needed, and they were not very good at returning phone calls. Finally, after weeks of trying, Ben was able to get the right person on the phone and to talk with him in Spanish and we were sent the document that we needed to show he was not a criminal while there. We found out later that my mother had been fasting and praying that morning for our success in getting the clearance. Grateful!
6. We needed to provide copies of documents (as applicable) for each person in the family: birth certificates, marriage certificates, driver's licenses, proof of employment/income, and proof of health insurance and info on when our adopted children would be covered.
7. We also needed to provide signed statements that would allow our social worker to search out other clearances for each of us (like on the child abuse registry in various places).
8. We needed to have adequate fire extinguishers, supply a layout picture of our home, and schedule a time for an in-home visit.
9. Lastly, Ben and I needed to fill out information about each of our children and then a VERY detailed description of ourselves, including childhood experiences and memories, relationships with our own siblings and parents, our child-rearing paradigms, the health of our marriage, etc. This took a long time!
Apart from #9 and waiting for clearances to come back, getting the Chilean clearance proved to be the hardest item. (Thankfully Israel didn't keep such records because Ben lived there for 6 months
while in college, and finding out how to get that clearance might have been equally tricky!).
Once most of the clearances came through, our facilitator came for the in-home evaluation and interviews. She interviewed us all together, Ben and me together, and all of us individually. We really enjoyed our time with her!
By now we had been at this project for almost two months. We should have had our finished Homestudy about two weeks later, but there were some unexpected hitches (that we came to trust were God's way of lining up our timing with His) and we did not receive our Homestudy for about 6 weeks. Waiting felt brutal!
We couldn't finish applying with the U.S. government for approval to adopt internationally until we had a copy of our Homestudy to send them. The Homestudy is the proof they need that a person is capable of caring well for an adopted child. (Approval fees are $720, which includes the right to classify the newly adopted child as an immediate relative, and we needed an additional $85 each for Ben and me to get fingerprints done for a federal check.) Once they had this, they would issue the approval within about 6-8 weeks.
B. Get Ukraine approval to adopt and receive an SDA appointment
Meanwhile we began compiling our dossier, something not unlike a Homestudy, but this time for Ukraine. We had to do most of the stuff listed above a second time. (Yes, new doctor appointments for me and Ben, new and more complicated fingerprints,etc. A. Second. Time.) However, this time things needed to be officially certified or notarized and then the notarized documents had to receive an apostille (official stamp) by the Secretary of State that affirmed that the notary had the right to authenticate the documents. Furthermore, all documents had to be notarized as close to the date we expected to travel as possible and all notary stamps had to have an expiration at least a year away. We completed notaries at our bank for free. Our medical verification forms had to be notarized in the doctor's office, and thankfully we had a friend who is a notary who was willing to go with us there.
We live 30 minutes from the Capitol, so getting the documents to the Secretary of State was a short drive instead of a very frightening mail-in procedure. (Frightening because letting those documents out of my sight would have taken a lot of courage. They represented so much work!) Apostilles cost $10 or $15 per notary stamp in our state, up to a $100 per child per set of documents. At the time we thought we were adopting two, so we spent $200 on this (with over 30 documents).
Note about certified documents and apostilles: our marriage license had to be ordered from the state we were married in ($15 each and we needed 2, but because of delays we had to do it twice!) and then mailed back for an apostille ($20 each, also done twice).
The FBI clearance required by Ukraine (the two other FBI clearances we had completed couldn't be used) had to be apostilled in D.C. First we paid our local sheriff's office a small fee to do our fingerprints, then we paid a "handler" company to walk the prints into the FBI during a time when they would process them and to pick them up when completed. For some reason mine were completed quickly and Ben's took another week! Then we sent the completed, certified clearances to a company called Caring Hands to expedite the apostille process. An expediter receives the paperwork that needs an apostille and walks it into the office of the Secretary of State and waits in line for the necessary stamp. A mailed in form takes a lot longer because it is placed in the back of the line of all other forms and has to inch it's way forward. (FBI clearances for both of us were about $200, including the expediter and handler fees.)
In addition, we had to fill out a lot of forms that requested permission to adopt in Ukraine, allowed the Ukrainian Government to request various clearances for us, and promised that we would abide by Ukrainian adoption rules and regulations. We also had to provide copies of the deed to our home and
secure a form from the tax assessor that verified square footage of our house. (This last form was tricky because no one had ever seen anything like it before. Thankfully I found some sympathetic office aides that helped push it through! It took me a number of days of work, and then we had to redo it when delays made the notary stamp too old).
We felt like the bulk of our dossier paperwork was complete a few weeks after we received our completed Homestudy in the mail in November. So we started having dossier documents notarized. However, our U.S. approval to adopt hit one more snag and we were into the Christmas holiday, still waiting for approval.
In Ukraine, most of the government shuts down for the bulk of December and January. We had tried to beat this deadline but didn't make it, so I decided to take a break, enjoy the holiday, and to look at things again when we received our official U.S. approval. This came mid January, almost 6 months after we first began our adoption paperwork. At times the speed of this process was terribly aggravating, but at each point we did as much s we could, as quickly as we could, and then trusted the rest to our Father in Heaven.
As alluded to above, all previous notaries had to be redone because too much time had elapsed. Thankfully that wasn't costly (except for the marriage licenses) because they had a been completed free of charge at our bank. We signed many forms during Ben's lunch break at a bank near his work and became familiar faces there. However, the slightest mistake when signing meant a document had to be redone, and we learned after a few blunders to bring extra documents of everything just in case someone wrote the wrong date or something. (You just have to laugh when you make mistakes like that, because getting angry doesn't help. We made mistakes OFTEN.).
Mid-February we sent our completed dossier to our agency. We were three months behind the speedy schedule I had set in my mind and 7 months into the process. But I guess it wasn't time yet to go, because our agency director who was supposed to review everything got sick for a week. And then, as she was getting better she realized that the Homestudy needed to be redone with some different wording (I cannot say how this was missed beforehand -- it was just another way our Father in Heaven worked out the timing to match His plan). But our social worker was out of the country for a week and a half, so we had to wait again.
We finally received the updated Homestudy in April and I Fedex'ed it to Ukraine so we could make the deadline of having everything submitted that week (submissions for the particular age group of children we hoped to adopt could only be turned in on Thursdays. Weird.) I was tired of waiting.
We were submitted mid April, officially registered with the Ukrainian government mid May (which means our paperwork was accepted!), and finally received notice on May 27th that we had an official appointment with the SDA, the department of the Ukrainian government that oversees adoptions, on June 10th. We needed to be in the country two days prior to that to get settled and to meet with our facilitator.
C. Travel, receive a referral to visit a child, commit to adopt a child
We purchased our tickets to fly via Golden Ticket Travel. They are able to find discount tickets for families adopting or doing mission work. Ben and I were both able to travel for about two-thirds the price of a ticket purchased on our own. What an incredible blessing!!
Travel took about 18 hours, including layover time. My one piece of advice: do your best to stay awake the entire time, waiting to sleep only when it is night-time in your destination country. We did this and did not struggle with jet-lag at all. Another blessing!!
Our facilitator sent a driver to pick us up at the airport and to deliver us to our apartment in Kiev. We would stay there about three or four days. She met us there and we talked about possible children for our family. Many people come with children already in mind, although in Ukraine you cannot pre-select a child. However, we were not sure who the Lord intended for us. We just had some age parameters and some impressions.
Our appointment with the SDA was in the morning on a Wednesday. In Ukraine, most of the children in orphanages are not available to international families. The listings of those who are available are not very detailed and most of the pictures are outdated. We knew that our ability to find the child we were sent for was all in our Father's hands.
Families are allowed one referral to see one child (or sibling set). The referral is granted at that appointment but the paperwork is issued the next day in the afternoon. With paperwork in hand you board a train for your child's region. If, after visiting, you realize the child is not a good match for your family, you may request another appointment and receive another referral and visit another child. Families are allotted a total of three referrals. If they do not find someone within that time, they are sent home and have to resubmit their dossier.
Our train took 7 hours and we arrived near midnight. We stayed in a hotel and rested for our visit to the orphanage the next day. What a range of emotions traveled through our heads this night! We slept fitfully. It didn't help that we didn't know how to use the A/C and were hot!
Before the orphanage visit we visited the regional authorities, turned in our referral, and received necessary forms. Then we drove to the orphanage. We were ushered into a room with the director of the orphanage, a social worker from the region, an orphanage lawyer, an orphanage doctor, and our facilitator (who was also our translator). At this point we were told all of our daughter's background, including medical and emotion history. Then our daughter came in and everyone stopped to watch her.
There seemed to be a system in place that our daughter understood, because she asked and got permission to open a drawer full of candy. She proceeded to hand out suckers to everyone in the room. This gave us an incredible opportunity to watch her interact with a lot of people without her interactions with us being the main focus. She was full of laughter and joy!
We talked with her a bit and then went outside to play. Ben and I were just in awe. We were here. She was here. It was magical.
But short-lived, because she had to go in to lunch about 5 minutes into our playtime. She began to cry when she had to leave, but she swallowed her tears and went.
We asked if we could go and see where she was eating, and our facilitator said no -- that was not usually permitted. However, by some miracle, five minutes later we were given permission to go in!
We walked into a small cheerful lobby and up some stairs. Her group room had three small tables with four chairs each. The children were eating soup and bread. We sat off to the side and interacted with them by smiling, making silly faces, and winking. The children loved it! They were so animated and full of joy! I think we were a distraction because the three ladies attending them had to keep reminding them to eat. We were allowed to stay in the room for about five to seven minutes and then asked to leave.
Our facilitator met us when we were outside and asked what we thought -- was she the one?
We told her that we were pretty certain but needed some time to talk and pray, so she went inside to work through some things and left us in the orphanage gardens for about 30 minutes. These gardens and the loveliness of the orphanage were not something we had expected. Our daughter had grown up in a beautiful and loving place. We were full of gratitude for the many that had loved her and helped her to flourish. We talked with our Father in Heaven and knew with certainty that this little girl was the one He had sent us to find and that she should be the only one we brought home. We felt wrapped in the arms of the Spirit and full of quiet peace and joy.
We told our facilitator, "Yes!" We had been in the country about 4 days.
D. Receive regional and national approval to adopt the child, set up a court date
Regional approval should have been received in a few days but took about a week. National approval couldn't be sought without the regional approval, so we waited. While we waited, we explored the city and visited our daughter for an hour and a half each day. We had moved from the hotel into an apartment where we could cook our own meals, wash clothing, and rest. (Day-to-day living, including transportation/food/housing ranges from about $50 - $100 per day in our region. It depends on how much you want to spend on outside meals and tourist adventures.)
National approval takes two weeks, we were told. It could only be submitted on certain days. We received it on one of the first few days in July. The local judge was busy, however, so the court date was set for July 14th. This was hard for me to swallow. We had been away from our children at home so long! But I began to see that the increased time with our daughter was giving us critical bonding opportunities, and I quieted my frustrations.
E. Have court, wait 10 days for court decree to become official
This is the part we are at now, so I cannot comment on how it went, just on how we are told it will go. Perhaps, after the fact, I will return and edit this portion.
The 10 days after court are for any possible objections to the ruling to be brought forward. In rare cases, and in some regions, a judge will waive the 10 day waiting period. In others, he/she may mandate that the family stay in country for the 10 days but that they can begin doing their exit paperwork in Kiev while the 10 days elapse. In some cases, the 10 days can refer to actual days, and in others the judge may demand that they are business days.
(For our court experience, please see the post on July 15, 2015.)
Our region requires that all families wait 10 calendar days before beginning any exit paperwork.
F. Complete exit paperwork in Ukraine, return home, complete U.S. paperwork.
This involves having a new birth certificate made with your child's name and your names as the parents. (You can choose the name your child will have on this form. That is a challenge!) This has to be done in your child's birthplace. For us, this is about a 2 hour drive away.
Other exit procedures are completed in Kiev and include getting a medical evaluation so your child can receive a visa. Getting your child a passport. Visiting the U.S. Embassy to fill out forms. Buying tickets home. (And probably more things that I just don't know because we aren't there yet!)
When you arrive home, there are other forms that have to be filed with the U.S. government. There are also periodic forms that need to be sent back to the Ukrainian government to keep them up to date on the well-being of your child. Your child keeps dual citizenship until he/she is 18 years old!
In addition, you will take your child to many initial and follow-up medical/dental/neuro-psychological appointments. If you are enrolling your child in school, there will be those appointments, too. We have decided to wait a year for that. Our daughter is a young five and could use the time to gain English skills and acclimate to a new life.
There. That is a bit about the process. ;)
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