Q & A: Session 4 (a.k.a. Twenty Simple Steps to Intercountry Adoption)

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"Gwen, do you know which children you are going to adopt?  When will you find out?"
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Sadly, "finding" our children comes closer to the end of the process than the beginning. Here's the order of events, as I understand them:

1. Registration with provincial agency (our agency, located in Victoria, is Choices Adoption and Counselling.)
2. Submit about three thousand documents (including autobiographies, medical forms, criminal record checks and Interpol fingerprinting)
   
3. Begin education on Transracial Adoption issues, attend Adoption Education Seminar for pre-adoption education about attachment, loss, transracial issues, grief and adjustment.
   
4. Home Study (approx. 3 months: meeting with a Social Worker to assess our suitability for adoptive parenting)
5. Registration with Ethiopian facilitator (This is an adoption agency in Ontario, called Imagine Adoption.)
   
6. Preparation of dossier, and gathering of further documents, including Marriage Certificate, proof of life insurance, a letter to the Ethiopian Ministry of Women's Affairs, Notice of Assessment from Revenue Canada, etc. Dossier is forwarded to Imagine Adoption for translation.
   
7. Dossier is sent to Ottawa to Foreign Affairs and the Ethiopian Embassy for authentication and legalization.
   
8. Application to Citizenship and Immigration Canada, to begin the process of applying for Citizenship for our two (unnamed) children.
9. Dossier is sent to the orphanage in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where two children will be matched with our family.
10. We wait for a referral...... (Note:  we waited just over 17 months for our referral.)  We have been referred two absolutely beautiful children:  a BOY, 7 years old, and a GIRL, 3 1/2 years old.
    
11. We accept the proposed children!
12. We wait for a court date, to determine if our children will be awarded Canadian Citizenship. The wait for a court date could be several months.  At this point, we also start getting whatever vaccines are required.
    
13. Once we have a court date, we must travel to Ethiopia to attend court.  We will have a chance to see our children at the orphanage, in a group setting, without letting the children know that we are their future parents.  Yeah... that will be easy.  
14. Once we pass court, the children will be our legal children.  After court, we will return to Canada without the children.
15. The children's Ethiopian passports will be issued in Addis Ababa, with our last name as their new last names.
16. The children's Citizenship applications will be sent by courier to the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi, Kenya.
17. We wait some more.... waiting for the children's Ethiopian passports to be stamped with a Canadian Facilitation Visa.
    
18. We will travel to Addis Ababa to meet our new children.
    
19. Return to Canada with our new children..... and then the real work of bonding, attachment and adjustment begins.
20. Social Worker completes three post-placement reports following the adoption; after the first year, we will submit annual updates to Imagine Adoption, complete with photographs of our new children in our family.

So there they are... 20 simple steps to an expanded family. Easy as pie or what?