Details and Call for Prayer

I feel a bit overwhelmed. I just got off the phone with Karen Friedman, the woman who organizes the adoption of Chinese babies for expatriates living in China. We had been waiting to hear from her for over a month. We had hopes that the phone call from her would trigger the beginning of months of business in the process toward adoptiong a Chinese baby.

Although we may be about to embark on that journey, her conversation gave me a lot more to think about than I expected. If you are interested in the details, please read through to learn what we're thinking and praying through. If this is too much information, please jump to the prayer request at the bottom of this post.


Both the United States and China have accepted the Hague Adoption Convention. The Hague Convention is an international treaty where all countries signing on to the convention agree to have their international adoptions follow set international standards. The Hague Convention is new, and the United States only ratified it on April 1st. All international adoptions from the United States may be a bit confusing for the next few months, as all international adoption agencies struggle to apply the new regulations and figure out exactly how to move forward under the new state of affairs.

The Convention has no exemptions for expatriates. Most countries allow expatriates to adopt outside of the rules of the convention, but not America. In fact, the United States makes it so difficult to work outside of the rules that currently all adoptions by expatriates living in China are halted.

Please allow me to reiterate that - all adoptions by expatriates living in China are currently halted.

Karen Friedman, the woman referenced above, has been organizing expatriate adoptions in China for years. She has facilitated hundreds of them, with a 100% success rate. We have heard wonderful things about her and I was thrilled to finally talk to her. She made a wonderful impression on me. Apparently she has also made a strong impression on the US Embassy in China, the Chinese government and the US State Department - all of which are working with her to ensure that expats in China can resume adoption as soon as possible.

I will explain how this applies to us by sharing the best case and worst case scenarios.

Best Case Scenario:
Karen receives accredidation from the United State government in July. We home study in September, and then must still submit to a new US processing center before submitting to the Chinese government. This could take anywhere from 2 weeks to 6 months - that's how new the processing center is. Then we're looking at a 14 month wait, which puts Mei Mei in our home as early as February 2011 and as late as June. This is much later than what we had originally projected - December of 2010. Still, this is much quicker than any other adoption we are willing to consider.

Worst Case Scenario:
Karen does not receive accredidation from the US government, and we have no option to adopt while living as expatriates.


The Prayer Request
Knowing that we're looking at a 2 year process, we should begin the adoption process as soon as possible. But if we begin the adoption process immediately, we risk losing up to $1,000 by learning later that as expatriates, we are ineligible for international adoption.

We need to decide whether to a) move forward immediately, b) c) wait for accredidation, or decide not to add to our family over the next few years.

Please pray for wisdom in our decision. But primarily, please pray that we can hear God's voice clearly and that we make this decision based on God's plan for our family and a little Chinese baby rather than on our desires or fears.