I think the number one question I get these days is “what’s going on with the adoption?” I wish there was an easy answer but there are a lot of changes going on right now in Kaz. Unfortunately it seems like things are hard all around these days in the world of international adoptions – Guatemala and Vietnam are closed, China and Russian are barely crawling along and I think this has put a lot of pressure on Kaz.
Kaz has said that you can no longer specify a gender in your dossier. For some agencies it seems like they just outright rejected any dossier (the only exception was if the dossier(s) had been assigned to a region) that had a gender specified and those people have to start over. I feel so bad for them. I can’t imagine having to start over from scratch. So far that has not been an issue with my agency but going forward I think the plan is that the dossiers not state a gender preference. I’m still hoping to be able to adopt a girl but if it comes down to adopting a boy or nothing I’ll definitely adopt a boy.
There is an agency accreditation process going on as well. During the summer the Kaz Embassy put out a statement that said that after September 15th only Hague accredited agencies will be allowed to work in Kaz. It also said that all agencies that wanted to continue to working in Kaz had to submit certain information to the Embassy and that the Embassy would then post a list of agencies that would be approved to continue to process adoptions. Fortunately my agency is Hague accredited and per the list that I saw posted on the JCICS website (
http://jcics.org/Kazakhstan.htm) late last week has also been “cleared” to process adoptions in Kaz. From what I’ve read the next step is for the MFA to evaluate the in-country coordinators for these agencies.
Unfortunately all this has slowed the process down considerably but hopefully once it’s all completed things will start moving faster again. I’m hoping that I’ll have a region assignment before the end of the year.
On to other things . . .
I used to love this show on BBC America called “Ground Force.” The premise of the show was that a group of professional landscapers would come redo the garden of a homeowner that was out of town. I had my own mini-version of this last week. I went to go make my lunch one afternoon and just happened to look out my window to see two people in my front yard. It turns out it was my parents. They were digging up my daylily (which had grown too big for the space) and had brought new plants for the little tiny patch of garden I have in front of my house. Hopefully these fill fair better than the last azalea that my father had planted for me which I sadly killed (I have a brown thumb). :(
I took a break from adoption stuff to head to New York City for the weekend with my friend Latonya. We had a blast! Things are never dull in NYC and we definitely got a show just riding the subway. In a matter of less then five minutes we had one guy sing a song and then another guy pull out a bible and preach. Speaking of shows we saw Wicked which was AMAZING. It was so good we already want to go back and see it again. We walked around Soho and Chinatown (which was completely mobbed) on Saturday afternoon and we lucked into a street fair on Sunday morning. I had promised myself that I wasn’t going to buy any more baby stuff until it was closer to travel time but I just couldn’t help myself when I saw this:
