Onze papieren lagen ergens in China bij het CCAA op één van de vele stapels. Bekijk de foto’s hieronder maar eens!!

Je kunt hier zien hoe het CCAA (China Center of Adoption Affairs, die de procedure in China doet) te werk gaat.

The photo descriptions and photos are courtesy of Amy Eldridge. Amy owns the copyright on these photos! She was kind enough to share her photos with the China adoption community.

The first one is a photo of what a child's "info sheet" looks like. It has their photos and then a general description and what their likes and dislikes are. The woman matched this child to a family for me while I was there. She told me that they pull up the passport photos of the parents, and that has their name, their jobs, and the parents likes and dislikes. This particular child liked music and I believe one of the parents taught music (it had something to do with music). So she thought they were a "match". She will pull up a parents file and then she has 4-5 babies in a stack and she will hold up the sheet with the baby and see if something "jumps out at her" as a match. She said sometimes it is appearance, sometimes it is a hobby.....sometimes it just "feels right".

The second photo is the post placement cabinets. They are coded by agency and year. They keep METICULOUS records of who files and who doesn't. And no, the woman is not about to hit me because I was late. I promise she liked me! Just a bad shot. :-)

The third one is of another match taking place. Those are parent files stacked on the ground. They are color coded by agency. Think CCAI might be red? :-) You can barely make out on the screen what they see on the parents. It has the passport photos and then a general description of their jobs and hobbies. Your wonderful dossier photos don't make it to the matching room....they are just for the review room.

The next one is of a young woman who works there in the matching department. That is a pretty typical cubicle.

The next one shows the stacks of dossiers. Again, they are color coded. Babies files are also color coded by province/orphanage. They do try to keep agency families together, so if they have a group of 25 families from one agency, they will go to an orphanage that they know sends larger groups of kids. If an agency only has three dossiers, they might go to an orphanage that sent just a few kids. And of course, sometimes it works out that 14 families go to one orphanage and then they have to pull a lone child from another orphanage. But they do try to make it easier on the agency facilitators by matching agencies with orphanages.

The next one is of them showing me the "notice of referral" (I forget how they word it). These are the official letters that they sign off on offering the child. The week I was there, the director was waiting to sign off on 800 referrals.

The next one shows all the referrals in the back.


And the last one is just a close up of the dossiers.