Over the years, people have asked me why we decided to adopt from Ukraine, and my standard response has always been that it was accidental. Once we stopped trying to have a baby of our own and decided to explore other ways in which to start our family, Pa and I looked into both domestic and international adoption. We found a local agency that handled adoptions from China, and attended an open house to learn about the process.

At the open house, the director of the agency told us about a new program they were starting in Ukraine, and I think what initially made it so appealing was the fact that the adoption could be completed in one trip and the process took only 6-8 months, while adoptions in China, Guatemala, or Korea took a year or more.

We also thought that Ukraine’s culture and history was something we wanted to learn more about, and given that Pa’s family is Polish and Austrian and my mother was born and raised in Germany, we were drawn to that part of the world.

But the deciding factor for us was that we found Ukraine’s adoption process to be unlike any other country. For one thing, Ukraine does not allow pre-selection of a child and the potential adoptive parents are granted an appointment to go to the adoption center in Kiev to look at several different profiles of children, and choose one child they would like to meet in person. In other countries, a couple’s dossier is sent for review by adoption officials, who will choose a child’s profile, based on the couple’s request of age and gender. The profile is then sent to the couple, and if they accept, they then fly to the country and meet the child in person. We preferred Ukraine’s process because we would be the ones to choose from a group of referrals, rather than having someone else make that decision for us.

So in July 2002, we signed on with the agency and they gathered all of the necessary paperwork to assemble a dossier that they would send to Ukraine for approval, including copies of our marriage license, birth certificates, police clearances, medical records, tax returns, letters of employment verification, and letters of reference from three friends. They put us in touch with a social worker, who conducted an interview for our home study–which is a report that describes our backgrounds, our families, our careers, and our home life in great detail.

Meanwhile, we had to file a request with Homeland Security to grant us permission to bring an orphan into the United States, and had to write a letter to the adoption officials in Ukraine promising that we would send them annual reports of our child, along with pictures. We also had to promise that the child would have a dual citizenship, and at the age of eighteen, the child would either have to renounce his Ukrainian citizenship or sign up for army duty.

Each document had to be notarized, and then sent to the Secretary of State to be apostilled (basically someone from the Secretary of State’s office looks up each notary seal and verifies that it’s legit.) Once the documents were apostilled, they had to go to the State Department for authentication (basically someone ensures that the apostilles are legit).

It seems like a lot, I know, but we were happy that the adoption agency took care of most of the dossier. Once they had everything assembled, they had everything translated into Russian.

Things were going along just fine, and we weren’t too worried when the six month mark had passed and we still hadn’t had our dossier fully assembled. But then six months turned into eight months, then ten months, then twelve months. All the while, the agency kept saying “we’re almost done, we’re almost done…” but we wondered what happened to the time table we were promised.

Finally, in July 2003, the dossier was sent to Ukraine, but it was immediately rejected by the adoption officials, due to a missing document. The agency director just shrugged his shoulders and said, “I had no idea. You guys are our first couple, which makes you the guinea pigs!” We were livid.

In late August, when the missing document was still…missing, the director told us that he had success with a family who had signed on just after we did, and in September he was going to escort them to Ukraine so he could see the process first hand. He promised he would hand deliver our dossier to the adoption center in Kiev and would follow-up to ensure it would be approved.

By late September, we hadn’t heard anything further from the agency. I called the office and the director’s wife told me that he was still in Ukraine, but she had no idea whether or not her husband hand delivered our dossier. I couldn’t contain my anger any longer–especially when she offered to write us a check for services not yet performed, if we decided to go with another agency.

I felt helpless and I didn’t know what to do. So I summoned the gods of Google and looked to see if there were other local agencies with programs in Ukraine, and then I learned the most amazing thing: adoption in Ukraine could be done independent of an agency, and in fact, even though couples can use an agency to gather the paperwork, the adoption agency cannot go to Ukraine to facilitate an adoption on the couple’s behalf.

To be continued…

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