The mysterious matching room ...

In my earlier post, I didn't talk about what happens to your dossier once it gets to China. We're going under the Waiting Child program, and I'm not entirely clear if our dossier follows the same path, but here's a quick breakdown of what happens to the dossiers that go to the CCAA for a non special needs adoption, including a peek into the CCAA

1. First, your agency's staff (most likely in Beijing)f translates your dossier and takes it to the CCAA. The date it leaves your agency for china is the DTC ("Dossier to China" date)


2. But it's not the DTC date that matters, it's the LID ("Log In Date"). That's the date that your dossier officially gets "into" the CCAA system. From what I can glean, that can take about a month.

3. Your dossier waits in queue (could be several months) and at some point proceeds to the "translation room" where the agency translation is verified.

4. Your dossier goes to the review room. And it stays there for a while!

5. Your dossier goes to the matching room! how long it stays there depends on a lot of things, the most important of which is the number of "paper ready" kids v. the number of dossiers.

This is what I've found a picture of on the site for Adoption Advocates International
Here's the pic: Click the link to see and read more.


Continuing on ...

6. Your dossier goes to the referral room and a formal referral is signed and gets sent back to your agency.

7. You get it, stare at your baby's picture, dance around the room, and sign it and return it!

8. You wait for your travel approval and then ... off you go!

From what I can tell, if you're adopting a waiting child, as we are, you don't do the matching room (we're already matched!) and the process moves a bit faster. In the grand scheme of things, how our paper gets through the system isn't important so long as in the end we bring our little girl home!