Adoption Progress

Things are slowly moving along with our adoption. There have been some strange concerns lately around the Guatemala adoption environment. There’s an upcoming concern about the Hague treaty. This is an international treaty around adoptions and any country agreeing to it must meet certain standards (primarily to prevent shady dealings, coercion, etc.). Guatemala has agreed to the treaty, but hasn’t put the proper procedures in place yet. If they do not do so in a timely manner the US might decide that no adoptions will be allowed until Guatemala gets it’s act together.

That, however, is down the road and we are far enough along that it should not impact us. The State Department has stated that anyone with an approved I-600A form will be grandfathered and we’re way past that part.

The next issue was an adoption facilitator in Guatemala getting arrested. It’s somewhat of a strange story. Apparently this adoption facilitator was trying to arrange an adoption for a couple in Washington state. The adoption was completed, the couple came to see the baby and discovered that the baby was malnourished and had other health issues. The couple balked, and went back to the US to consult with a doctor. But at this point the adoption had been completed so the Washington couple were legally the girl’s parents.

The adoption facilitator was concerned that the couple wasn’t going to follow through and the child would end up in an orphanage, where her condition would likely get worse. So she snuck the baby into the US, presumably to take care of her herself. She got busted for doing that.

The concern is that now Guatemala is investigating and that this will distract from the regular adoption process in Guatemala.

But despite all of that, we appear to be about 2-3 months away from adopting our baby. Below is a chart from the State Department with a general overview of the process and timelines. We’ve completed the first four steps (green is completed). Really the first five are the bulk of the process. Once the adoption goes through PGN (Guatemalan Solicitor’s General Office – step 5) you are pretty much done. PGN is somewhat of a black hole. The timeframe of 2 months listed below has a very wide swing. Our adoption agency said 6 weeks to 3 months. But still, it’s getting close. June would be realistic.

The strange thing is that if this were a normal pregnancy, my wife would be quite large by now and I think we’d be doing a lot more planning. But because the adoption is so abstract to our day to day life, we really haven’t done much to prepare. I guess it’s partly because this will be our second and we know the drill (and we have all the stuff). But the whole thing still doesn’t seem real yet.