Info on Wait Times 1

Again, from Yahoo China adoption groups:

This came from an agency rep. who attended the Joint Council on
International Children Services. Please know that the China Center
of Adoption Affairs (CCAA) has not given any of the following
information in writing, so unless otherwise indicated, the
information below is simply a collaboration of information from
adoption professionals throughout the U.S. who are currently working
with the CCAA:

1. There are currently 25,000 dossiers at the CCAA that have been
processed and are waiting to be matched with referrals.

2. There are only 400-700 kids' files being sent to the CCAA each
month. The CCAA has to wait on these files to be sent to them from
the Department of Civil Affairs in each province, and the Dept. of
Civil Affairs must wait on the files to be sent to them from each
respective orphanage.

3. The backlog is thus caused because there are more dossiers
waiting for referrals than there are available children's files
being sent to the CCAA.

4. Orphanages must file a tremendous amount of paperwork in order to
register one child for adoption. The paperwork is being done, but
not fast enough to keep the waiting period less than 18 months.

5. There are no longer specific orphanages that can send children's
files to Civil Affairs and then to the CCAA, any orphanage in China
is now permitted to send files to the CCAA.

6. The Chinese government is working to register more children for
adoption (who are deemed abandoned children and thus legally
available for adoption).

7. Regarding the new regulations that will go into effect on May
1st, 2007, China made the decision to implement much stricter
regulations because they want to decrease the wait for referrals.
They talked through many different ways to decrease the waiting
time, and they decided to tighten up the regulations to accomplish
their goal. They do not desire to cease adoptions altogether.

8. The CCAA has confirmed that the 2008 Olympics in Beijing will not
affect the adoption process at all.

9. The new regulations going into effect on May 1st are not
retroactive. This means that no dossier sent to the CCAA and
arriving there before May 1st will be reviewed according to the new
guidelines, however, the CCAA has already begun reviewing dossiers
with much more caution. It has recently become commonplace (amongst
all agencies working with the CCAA) for the CCAA to request
additional documentation regarding finances, medical conditions, and
various other items in the dossier. Dossiers submitted after May 1st will be under very strict review according to the given guidelines.

10. How long will the waiting times for referrals of non-special
needs children extend to? The CCAA refuses to predict waiting times
of any kind. Any timeframe given to any agency is approximate and
cannot be guaranteed.

Ni Hao, Kai-lan

I read in the adoption groups that Nick Jr. is making a preschool show "about what it's like to be bicultural in America, as seen through the eyes of an inquisitive 5-year-old Chinese-American girl" that "will be to Mandarin Chinese what 'Dora the Explorer' has been to Spanish." Conor, Cameron, and Gabrian have all loved Dora and Diego. It will be cool if Kai-lan is a character that they take an interest in as well.
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=591289

Choosing a Name

Most people in the online adoption groups, it seems, give an American first name and keep the Chinese name given by the orphanage as a middle name. This is meant to preserve her Chinese identity and show that you honor her background, etc.

I found a different perspective on an adoption blog, though, from Chinese parents who have adopted from China. They chose a new Chinese name for their adopted daughter because, "Even though [she] has a Chinese name, that name has no particular heritage other than that of the orphanage/city in which she was born."

It seems that children in a given orphanage will all have the same assigned "surname," and the nannies will choose a given name. In this respect, the names on their Chinese documents are actually a marker of abandonment, which would not be honorable to the Chinese, but in fact, would be considered very bad luck and emphasize that there isn't a family lineage.

Because of this, I like the idea of choosing a new Chinese name, as this family did. But I understand that it is nearly impossible for an ignorant American to do. (Check out this article:
http://www.chinasprout.com/html/naming.html) So maybe it's just a bad idea.

A Good Thing To Remember

"Patience is a hard discipline. It is not just waiting until something happens over which we have no control: the arrival of the bus, the end of the rain, the return of a friend, the resolution of a conflict. Patience is not waiting passively until someone else does something. Patience asks us to live the moment to the fullest, to be completely present to the moment, to taste the here and now, to be where we are. When we are impatient, we try to get away from where we are. We behave as if the real thing will happen tomorrow, later, and somewhere else. Let's be patient and trust that the treasure we look for is hidden in the ground on which we stand."
–Henri J.M.Nouwen

Mèi Mei

In response to questions: No, Mèi Mei is not the name of our daughter. Mèi Mei means "little sister" in Chinese. For the boys, "dà gē" means eldest brother. "Gē ge" means older brother.

A Picture is Worth 1000 Words. . .

This is a picture of "finding ads." That is, abandoned babies have ads placed, asking for their families to claim them, before they are classified as orphans. It is like a lost pet section in an American newspaper. This picture is from Brian Stuy, who has two very interesting web sites: http://research-china.blogspot.com/ and http://research-china.org/.