The Referral Process

It seems when I talk to people about getting a referral they don't understand exactly what that means so I wanted to explain the process.

When our agency sent our paperwork to China in 2006 the CCAA (China Center of Adoption Affairs) received our paperwork and logged it into their system. This is called our LID or log in date. Our LID is March 29, 2006. Our file then went to the review room. In the review room they check all your paperwork to make sure you meet their requirements. It took us about a year to hear back that we had made it through review and we had officially been approved by China to receive a child. At that point our file was sent to a room to sit on a shelf until our LID was ready to be matched with a child.

Each month orphanages from around China send in files on children that are available for adoption. Each child must meet certain criteria to be approved for international adoption. The CCAA goes through all the children's files to make sure their paperwork is in order. Then, they begin matching the children's files with parent's files. When our file is matched with Raegan's file that is what is called our referral.

Once all the children have been matched and paperwork signed off on by one of the CCAA officials the referrals are shipped to the individual agencies around the world. Once our agency receives their package of referrals they will contact us with basic information about Raegan such as her birthday and where she is at. They will also send us pictures that day. Then they will get busy translating all the information in her packet into English and have it overnighted to us. So, we should receive all Raegan's information the next day. This will be information like measurements, medical exams, etc. We then sign the paperwork accepting the referral and overnight this back to our agency. They will in turn send it back to China to the CCAA.

We will travel to get Raegan about 6-8 weeks after receiving our referral. It takes this long because once the CCAA receives our acceptance paperwork they contact the orphanage to make sure everything is okay on their end. Then they will send us a Travel Approval or TA. This is basically a paper stating it is okay to travel into China. When we receive our TA the next step is for our agency to contact the American consulate in Guangzhou China for an appointment. This is where we must go for our Visa to bring Raegan into the US. This appointment will be at the end of our trip so all our travel arrangements will be determined by when we get this appointment. Once our agency has this appointment set they will begin to schedule all our travel. It usually takes 3-4 weeks to receive our TA and then a couple weeks before we actually leave for China.

I hope this helps explain the whole process a little better. We are expecting to hear from our agency that referrals have been shipped either this week or next. Of course we are hoping it will be this week!

Dena