A Dad's Journey Through International Adoption: Just touching in

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Just touching in

Thursday, March 08, 2007

Haven't really had anything pertinent to the adoption situation lately hence my lack of updates to the blog. But let me pass along some recent information (some of which I've mentioned before) that a few of the agencies which I feel are reliable are saying.

An agency received a specific request from a consulate here in the U.S. It was stated that a request by a consulate comes through the Russian Foreign Ministry which means that indeed the accreditation applications are making their way through the 4 ministries required to give their okay to reaccreditations.

Another agency stated that they have heard that all of the regions they work in will open up immediately after the accreditations are done and they (this agency) expects to see a significant number of new referrals.

This seems to make sense and there have been a number of agencies that have said they are hearing that the orphanages themselves are getting a bit overcrowded. I'm sure it's not like they are overly flooded and kids are sleeping on the ground or anything.

After all, over the past several years there are only about 5,000 adoptions by U.S. parents (closer to 3,000 in 2006). Even if you double that for other countries adopting Russian children (which I doubt it's that high), that still means it's just an additional burden of about 10,000 children a year.

Depending on the stats you believe, Russia has about 750,000 children in orphanages. Not all of them are eligible for adoption but the point I'm making is that the overcrowding is just about an additional 1%.

However, when you're understaffed and underfunded even a 1% increase is not a good thing. So there's probably going to be, like that agency said, a significant number of referrals as soon as the accreditations are sorted out. And hopefully for those parents who already have accepted a referral court dates will also be set quickly.

posted by Steveg @ 12:26 PM

1 Comments:

At 4:16 PM, Anonymous said…

We can hope, we can hope....thanks for your thoughts. I like reading your blog updates. Your agency has been great in keeping you guys posted.

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I'm Steve and this is my wife Stefanie. This is our story, mostly seen through my eyes, of the journey to create our family by adopting a child from Russia.

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