For family and friends that have more details of our situation,
please do not comment about any knowledge you have at this time, due to contractual obligations we are under, information of any sort must not be entered or discussed in this forum, thank you. All will be explained soon.
Well adoption fan’s I must apologize for the long interruption of no activity. We feel your pain. We have been getting all of your messages and well wishes and we REALLY appreciate them.
The following is a completely hypothetical and grammatically confusing rendering of what we might have gone through up until now. Any similarities to real events or people are coincidental and not, contractually speaking, derogatory representations of a certain agency, as this scenario is only in my head…I guess.
We might have been given 3 different dates for submittal of our dossier, all of which probably came and went with nothing. We might have asked questions and would have been told that we aren’t allowed to interfere with the process and we just don’t understand the system. We could have been told that the facilitator for a certain agency was trying to get our dossier in through the back door and that is the way things are done. I would then have said something about our dossier being received in January and asked why there was no appointment made since the SDA didn’t open up appointments until February. The answer would probably have been,” you just don’t understand how it works. The facilitator always gets children at the age requested.” I, of course, would have responded in a very negative manor that the process hadn’t even begun, why in the hell would I care about the success rate of the final step.
I would probably try and find out how to get our dossier moved to an effective facilitator that so many of our e-friends seem to have. We would have been reminded at this point that the contract we would have signed probably had stipulations that the contract would be terminated with no refunds or returned documents if we, hypothetically:
1. contacted any one in Ukraine about our adoption
2. spoke ill to or about a certain agency
3. contacted sources outside the certain agency with regards to our process
4. interfered with the process in any way, in the judgment of a certain agency
During this whole exchange, and I am just guessing here, we might have been transferred to 2 different case workers, the certain agency might have shut the program down to new clients, with absolutely no notification to the current program client's. Can you imagine the surprise we would have had, finding out that the program was shut down from the internet while we were dumping check after check into the certain agency. WOW, am I glad that didn’t happen We, being the nervous nellies we are, would have asked for regular updates or some contact in any way shape or form. At this point I am sure we would be labeled as difficult, imagine wanting information? The nerve we would have had. I am sure that after 3 weeks of NO contact we would get a terse email telling us that the director of the certain agency was now involved, no contact or note of course, but we would be told that was happening. I would assume I was being lied to, because I don’t think, hypothetically, the case manager would have been able to answer direct questions about the location of our dossier, the name of the facilitator or any real proof that the dossier left the US in the first place, which I would ask in a case that would typically happen like this. We would never have then contacted the SDA for registered Facilitators or checked on our dossier status, because, in this hypothetical situation, the SDA would not have heard of anyone named by the certain agency and our dossier would not be registered for an appointment. Also we would probably have been required to take an expensive 9-11 hour course on foreign adoption parenting, which, again big guess here, would turn out to be a 12 chapter (30-35 total pages)”e-book” of simplistic reading and questions that can be answered with no comprehension of the English language. An example might have been, “did you learn anything from this chapter?” YES, would be a tough answer to come up with. Good thing nothing like this really happens. If it did, I might be a little mad. Susan and I might also consider dumping the agency altogether and determine if we can still do this independently and come out ahead from the fees that a certain agency says we would still owe. Maybe.
But what is really happening, is that we are told everything is going along fine, even though we haven’t heard a damn detail. We are still with an agency that assures us, when
we call, that they are working hard. We still have hope that we will adopt a child, but we have very little hope that we will go to Ukraine in 2008.
Please tell everyone you meet or hear from that if they choose Ukraine, and they should, do it independently. Don’t be the fraidy cats we were, thinking that an agency would be in our best interest. You can do it alone and you should. I realize that most of this rant is money related but it is criminal what they expect us to pay. I am still in favor of paying the “expediting fee’s” but I demand service that I pay for and will show the world someone getting money for nothing. There is no reason to drain all available funds from the people who are doing the right thing to fund a process that seems determined to harm everyone in it. As you may have read from my last POV, I don’t understand why we allow ourselves to be held hostage by the end result and accept being bludgeoned financially and emotionally along the way without speaking up and challenging the system? I do know why, I just don’t like that we have to…
Love and best wishes to all in this journey,
Truman
We now return you to our regularly scheduled blogger.
