European Forums
European Forums have some discussion going over word that the CCAA told a European agency that the wait won’t exceed 18 months.
There is also news just hitting Europe that I reported from the reports coming out of the JCICS conference, that the CCAA is now allowing any orphanage to send dossiers for paper ready babies. They are no longer restricting it to the orphanages that have gone through the process of being approved to submit babies for IA.
As I said after the JCICS conference, if the CCAA is just now allowing all SWI’s to begin preparing paperwork it will likely be 6 to 8 months before we start seeing the paperwork for those babies. They will have to publish finding ads and do a lot of other paperwork on their babies, all of which takes time. Then the dossiers spend some time in the local provincial authority office before making their way to Beijing.
We had the rumor last year that they had added a whole lot of new orphanages in order to speed things up, and we had figured that we should begin seeing those babies in October’s referral batch. We did see some new orphanages come online, but we did not see an increase in the number of referrals.
So while I hope we do begin seeing a lot more referrals every month, I’m not going to count on it happening this time.
As for the 18 month thing, if they aren’t about to begin doing whole months then that’s not really possible. Besides, the CCAA just told another country, face to face, it’s going to be closer to three years.
In other words, I don’t really think we have anything new here, but it’s being talked about so I needed to address it.
May 21st, 2007 at 4:26 pm
HI RQ:
The time you spend researching is much appreciated. Thank you.
However, even if more babes are being referred by the orphanages to the CCAA, the CCAA will need to hire more folks to handle the onslaught. Otherwise, we won’t see any speed up anyway…am I right?
May 21st, 2007 at 4:34 pm
I think they probably have the personnel, they are referring out a lot less babies now than they were two years ago.
But they would have to up their quota and be allowed to refer more babies out.
Now, if they are planning to up the quota next year then this would be a good “reason” to be able to do that, I guess. Tell us now that they’ve made it possible for all of these SWI’s to submit, and then six months from now start referring out a lot more babies. They can then say this is the reason, and not have us just assume they slowed it down for the Olympics.
It should be noted that the last year there will be hard numbers for the Olympics is this year.
May 21st, 2007 at 4:44 pm
It just gets more and more interesting….
May 21st, 2007 at 4:50 pm
Won’t it already exceed 18 months with the next batch?
May 21st, 2007 at 4:56 pm
I agree RQ I think that the quotas will change after the Olympics and this is as good a reason as any to point to and say “see our numbers are higher because of more SWIs in the program”.
A couple of questions, do the CCAA actually admit there is a quota? And when do you think that the “year” will end? Is it calendar year or fiscal year?
Thanks for all you do.
B
4/19/06
May 21st, 2007 at 5:08 pm
Others would maybe know better but I don’t believe CCAA has ever admitted to a quota. That would fly in the face of the “no paper ready babies” statement. Also, it would invite unwelcome questioning of the quota number, etc.
May 21st, 2007 at 5:59 pm
Interesting!!! Maybe CCAA is thinking that allowing all the new orphanages will help the wait stay at 18 months???? 18 months, I can handle. 3 years? UGH!! I still just can’t accept that as fact quite yet.
His,
Mrs. U
LID 9-12-05
referral 1-4-07
“Gotcha” Day 2-25-07 for Elizabeth
http://www.makingahouseahome.blogspot.com
May 21st, 2007 at 6:27 pm
I guess I just go back to the last CCAA tour and the November of 2005 being referred in November 2006 comment. It was said that one of the touring CCAA head people was asked by a man with a 11/05 lid when his referral would come and the answer was 11/06. I think the CCAA will never give bad news face to face with a waiting parent. They do not like to be asked these questions and have no cultural issues with not telling the whole truth when asked these questions. The culture in China is to respond to unwanted questions with nice answers that will get you to go away without a problem. I think it is just the way it is and this visit does not give us more than we knew before. It is part of the whole but if it is accurate or not is anyones guess but I lean towards not. Sorry.
May 21st, 2007 at 6:44 pm
and SWI refers to??
Single White Iowan?
I am new to this! ;-)
May 21st, 2007 at 7:14 pm
Personally, I find it hard to believe anything that the CCAA says face to face… remember the 12/05 LID father that was told he would receive a referral by a certain time and that proved to be untrue? I guess I just don’t have any faith in what they say until it actually happens.
Wendy Norris
LID 12/27/05
http://adoptionandfire.typepad.com
May 21st, 2007 at 7:27 pm
SWI Social Welfare Institute (or institution)
May 21st, 2007 at 7:54 pm
I may be way off base, but I wondered if referrals might start going in the other direction once the new rules kicked in. If and when things start to pick up someday they will not have to deal with another onslaught of dossiers because they have limited it so much. Now, to just work through the backlog. Time will surely tell.
May 21st, 2007 at 8:00 pm
3 years… 18 months… sounds like more of the same before any given referral period. I hate to say it, but my realistic vote is cast for no further than November 10th this go round and the wait by the end of this year at 22 months… only time will tell what the truth really is.
May 21st, 2007 at 9:29 pm
My agency told me that it doesn’t matter how many orphanages, workers, or LIDs they increase. They will onlt let a set number of babies out per year. They do this because China’s government will not admit that they have a “problem” with abandonments.
May 21st, 2007 at 11:32 pm
Rumor Queen wouldn’t the Chinese elite want to clean out their orphanages BEFORE the Olympics start and thousands and thousands of people show up for the games to eliminate any possible embarrassment for them. It seems to be a easy answer. I know 2 days before Christmas eve we clean our house top to bottom before our guest arrive.
May 21st, 2007 at 11:37 pm
What makes you think any reporters will be allowed in an orphanage?
And if they are allowed in an orphanage, it will be Beijing’s choice as to which one, I’m sure.
But with the rules about not photographing children in orphanages and with the Hague rules about orphans not being exploited, I doubt any reporters will get into an orphanage.
May 22nd, 2007 at 12:02 am
I did not mean reporters at all. I guess I just don’t understand the adoption logic of China, its very frustating. China’s going to do what China wants to do and none us can change it.
May 22nd, 2007 at 1:15 am
The wait is already over 18 months. My 18th month is June 5th and there is no way I am getting a referral by then! WHy do they give such conflicting info to different countries? In an earlier post the wait was 3 years and now it won’t exceed 18 months? Do they say what they need to in order to please the audience at hand?
Adomom
LID 12-5-05
May 22nd, 2007 at 8:35 am
Yes. Chinese will NOT “rock the boat” in business (and other areas, but adoption, and the CCAA, and our agencies, are businesses). They tell you what you want to hear, so that they don’t make waves. It is not “lying” - it’s a cultural thing to not want to cause the other person embarrassment. “Yes, but” is often the way Chinese will answer a question that is “no” - though sometimes our Western ears don’t hear it that way - we just hear that they said “yes”.
They are NOT thinking about us parents and how long we wait - period. We are just there, patiently waiting to adopt the babies they will allow out. No matter how many of us are in line to get a baby, they are not going to speed up beyond what they feel comfortable referring out of China. They’ve said that if people are not able to wait (however long it takes) then, perhaps the China program is not for them. If we said that in the US, we’d be a lot blunter - ie, this is the line. It’s long. If you don’t like it, then drop out of it, because we don’t plan to allow more than 10K kids out a year! None of this beating around the bush - as we see it.
I think it’s funny so many people are saying things could change so much in 2-3 years… uh, wasn’t this the very reason the INS gave for not extending the life of the I-171H past 18 mos?
May 22nd, 2007 at 8:58 am
As to the CCAA apparently telling different agencies different things about the wait time, I suspect at least some of the time the CCAA reps simply tell the agencies what they think they want to hear. This would be in line with the “face” stuff that makes the CCAA not want to say “no” to the agencies. I guess there’s also the possibility that the agency reps hear what they want to hear/misinterpret what’s said and then report their misinterpretations back to their clients.
With an 11/30/05 LID, I just passed the 18-month-wait mark myself, so clearly that ship has sailed for a lot of us.
May 22nd, 2007 at 10:27 am
I think it’s likely CCAA is telling folks that they don’t want to wait to exceed - whatever, 12 mos, 18 mos, 24 mos - because they DON’T want it to exceed that.
But what they WANT isn’t gonna happen because there are just too many dossiers waiting in line.
If enough of us dropped out of the program, well, that’d make the line go faster, but I think you’ve got to be pretty far back to notice that.
Any ideas on how many Novembers and Decembers switched to SN or otherwise “left” the NSN line? Because as a 12/14/05 LID, I sure would like it if the line got shorter in front of me… but I kinda wonder how “likely” that is, considering we’re all “so close” - and yet SO far.
May 22nd, 2007 at 10:40 am
Since my dh and I began this process nearly 2 years ago - ugh!, I have been reading up alot on China - WSJ and Natl Geographic are great sources. I agree that the Chinese are not thinking about you/us as parents or parents-in-waiting. With 1.3 billion mouths to feed, they do not really consider the plight of the individual- everyone is dispensable and replaceable (remember Tiananmen Square?). So, you say, why not adopt out of the country all those “orphan mouths”?? That is where the saving face part comes in…perception is reality for them. I think that the world will be permitted to see only what the Chinese authorities permit them to see during the Olympics; they are masters at this. And like an earlier poster said: they are great at saying “yes” when the true answer is “no”. Also, remember that they have great stats to show the world - 10,000 babies ARE adopted from that country each year - more than from any other country. And with their one-child policy, orphans will be only a small part of the problems they will face as a country in the future!!
May 22nd, 2007 at 10:48 am
Alot of people are talking about attrition and how it could make the line shorter for those of us waiting. Haven’t we already established (in a post last week from RQ and also in a few threads in the forum) that the attrition issue is really more of a ‘wash’? That for every person who gets out of line to pursue another country there is another person who was once BEHIND us in line but who is now AHEAD of us because they switched to SN and got a faster referral?
Maybe i read these threads wrong, but i get the impression that attrition will not really make the line go faster, as long as there are significant numbers of people who switch to SN and travel sooner than they would have originally.
Just as an aside, i read alot of china adopt blogs, maybe 20ish regularly, and many of the blogger families are working on their 2nd adoption. Just in the past couple of weeks i have noticed 3 of these families, who had LIDs after me, recently find their child on a SN list. These folks will certainly be traveling before me, and i take that to mean there are now 3 more families ahead of me in the line than were originally. Again, maybe i am reading this wrong, but, with a 2/06 LID, i am assuming that attrition is a non-issue for me ( as far as speeding things up)
May 22nd, 2007 at 10:52 am
eli - maybe you missed this post?
http://chinaadopttalk.com/2007/05/14/attrition-logic/
May 22nd, 2007 at 10:53 am
dmp, you might want to choose a little better wording than “cleaning out the orphanage”. You make the children sound like dirt or something. And if you do a little research you’ll realize that international adoption has very little effect on the number of orphans in China. Orphanages are not being emptied. Only thinned down a tiny bit. Just a drop in the bucket.
May 22nd, 2007 at 11:08 am
RQ Thank you so much for your dedication here, we apreciate it, and we need it!
Accurrently I want to believe that the CCAA is doing something, I don’t believe that the CCAA is telling each one differents things…CCAA is working with this longer wait-time, and the way to do it is helping the babies that are in those institutions far away, that we never have mentioned, but all of this isn’t easy, because all this project need a maximum infrastructure, notaries, hotels, announcements in the newspapers,(as RQ told us) medical equipment, The people that work there have to learn how to do all this process, itsn’t easy…. a minimum of 6 months of work so we will see the results, maybe this is our mistake, we hope for the results too much fast and fast, and in this case it is not like that, we wanted to see after the Conference,in the October 05 already the results, these results are not immediate.
Kisses from Barcelona, :-)
Silvia
May 22nd, 2007 at 11:20 am
RQ - oh i read it, but since you asked the question, i’m taking it to mean i misinterpreted it! I’ll have to try again with a fresh brain, i’m definitely not good with stats.
I’m still thinking that with my 2/06 LID, i’m less likely to be (”positively”) affected by people pulling out of the program and more likely to be (”negatively”) affected by people switching to SN and bumping up.
May 22nd, 2007 at 11:27 am
Sylvia, the rumor was last March or April that a whole lot of the new orphanages were added. So we figured we should see more referrals by October. And that did not happen. So now, a year or so later we see a similar rumor and I just can’t get excited about it. I have hopes, but I’m not going to hang my hat on it.
Eli - there will possibly be a perceived speed up at some point, but I am at a loss to figure out when we might see it.
May 22nd, 2007 at 11:31 am
Sherry
http://chinaadopttalk.com/2007/05/04/attrition-the-results/
May 22nd, 2007 at 11:33 am
With no intent on pointing fingers or making anyone feel badly, when I read this phrase - “want to clean out their orphanages†- I immediately thought that my 5.5 year old could one day read this line and cringed. As a community, we would launch on any non-adoptive parent who used some of the phrasing we use when talking amongst ourselves.
Now, my 4 year old would flip off anyone who offended her sensibilities without a second glance ; )
May 22nd, 2007 at 7:44 pm
I read all the comments about “the CCAA will not allow cameras/reporters into the orphanages around the time of or during the Olympics”.
There is more than one way for a driven reporter to skin that cat:
1.) the CCAA shows them an orphanage that is full of only NSN babies or relatively empty. The reporter pieces together the story/expose based on ‘other’, say, local people, research. There are plenty unhappy with the one child rule and well, if you wait long enough in an alley, I bet a reporter could even catch on film someone leaving their child behind.
2.) a parent who is adopting captures video footage while they get their baby. There are people who could be con’d into turning over footage thinking the reporter was going to do a ‘nice story’. Before anyone jumps all over me saying “no parent would turn over a video”, remember that there are plenty of adopters who do not use online boards, chat rooms, help groups and some who even have no clue their wait is not “12 months”.
Food for thought. I am not a betting person, but I”m willing to take a bet on a story/expose coming out in say, 12-13 months, right at the height of the olympics.
May 22nd, 2007 at 10:43 pm
My China only large, conservative agency just put out their April “newsletter” available to their clients only, and it says to expect “19-20 months”… last month, that same letter posted an 18 month wait. So it’s been gradually creeping up.