VISA, ICPC, Grants

When we were told by the agency that they had received a mailed copy of the court docs they then started to prep the ICPC. It is at this point that you will want to mail in your Passport, photos, to get your Visa to India. It takes about 2 weeks to get them back. The Visa takes up a whole page in your passport and they want you to have at least 3 empty pages along with a passport that will not expire in the next 8 to 12 months.

Back to the ICPC Since the home office is in Texas and we are in California there is one more official piece of paperwork that needs to be competed before we make airline reservations, hotel... Although the India courts have given us guardianship if for some reason we are unable to care for our child then she would be remanded back to the adoption agency. As the agency is in Texas the court papers go to Texas. I guess if we did not go to India and she came here escorted we would have to go to the home office to pick her up. The ICPC is an Interstate Compact that says “hey California, we Texas have a ward of the state but we are sending her to you, is it ok?”

A few months ago I started looking at hotels and such, I'll post more details soon as now I really have to narrow down the choices and get ready to make the reservations.

I just finished up on our next to the last grant application. We have 12 grant requests that we have put out. Some will respond only if they grant the grant. So far we have heard nothing. It has been rather disheartening as I think grant funds have dried up. Part of this is peoples attitude. Kinda weird as we get questions like – Why do you want to take a stranger into your house? You know she is going to have problems and will be disruptive. And closer to home we have an individual who call our daughter as “That girl in India”. Up to this pint I have made an effort to keep identities private as you really don't have a need to know. Thus I have not yet posted any photos. When she is ours I will rectify that. But let's suffice it to say that “That girl in India” has a name and her name is Camille. We are about $13K short if what we need to get her home. Looking at one grant location I noted that their max was $10k that they give 3 to 4 times a year. Once you dig deeper I found that this year was not a good year as they were only able to fund a total of $4k. Signs of the economic times.

je

Notification of NOC 28AUG08

Knock – NOC

For the past two weeks I have been looking at hotels for the trip. Generally there are two methods that the agency recommends for tripping in India. One is to land in Delhi and then take a trip to Agra. the other is go straight to the orphanage city. Everyone recommends spending at least one day on the ground before heading up in an airplane for another day.

Day 1 Land in Delhi 4 hour road trip to Agra.

Day 2 Visit the Taj aka one grand mausoleum.

Day 3 Local outing to the markets to get proper clothing

Day 4 4 hour road trip to Delhi and flight to the orphanage.

Day 5 Visit the locality. Built in 11th century AD, the Stone revetments were considered an engineering marvel of those times. They show us how advanced the technology and skills were even at that point of time. The revetments helped save the city form many floods. That is on JE's list. The artisans are noted for their silver filigree.

Day 6 Pick up our daughter

Day 7 Travel to Delhi

Day 8 US Embassy, Doctor visit to get child clearance

Day 9 US Embassy

Day 10 Sight seeing/rest

Day 10 Get out of dodge

Somewhere in all this RN wants to get a locally made rug. Our in-country guide runs $100 /day. One of the families, suffering from an embarrassment of riches, stayed at $600-800 a night hotels in Delhi and Agra. I think they had to skimp on the orphanage and could only manage something like $300 a night rooms.

Unfortunately our fund raising efforts will not afford us such luxury. I think I have found a nice bed and breakfast in Delhi. The husband is an engineer/businessman and the wife a psychologist. They run only $100/night. Agra is expensive expensive so it looks like about $200/night. Could not find anything cheaper. Our orphanage city a has a real bargain at $50 a night it includes a bed a night stand a loo and "shower area" and nothing else. It does come with a meal deal which is quite reasonable. We might go this route. Only concern is first night where we really need a bath tub to giver our daughter a good scrubbing down.

We recently received some more photos of her. According to our incountry source a group was running fast down a hall and did not manage a turn. She got a good scrape on her noggin. Typical 2 yr old. She has also grown about 7 inches from when we first saw her. Man we got to get her home soon.

Work has been sending JE to training camp once a month. recently they were filling out the schedule for 2009. I called our handler – you know the one that never contacts us unless we make first contact. I asked her if she could get a feel for when this trip is supposed to take place. Well lookey here, two days later (today) she tells us that we received our NOC. Just in case you forgot…

No Objection Certificate (NOC):

A Certificate issued by CARA permitting the child to be placed with a prospective adoptive parents for Inter-country adoption.

Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA):

An autonomous body functioning under Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment to act as a central authority in the matter of adoptions.

That means that they have approved us and our daughter to be placed. YEEEE HAAAAA!!!!! One hurdle down. We still have the courts to go through then translation and certification of the court records then more paper work here then the holidays and end of year festivities of both countries. So we were verbally told Jan or Feb but could be March or April for our travel.

The cost of the adoption has been modified. Look back for the spreadsheet. If you are flush with funds and want to help get her home, drop us a line. The next post will be a sanitized version of our virtual Evite that we sent out to close to 400 folks. JE called it his beg-a-thon.

je

Road Blocks

Sleeping Constables (speed bumps for you yanks)

Ok so up until this point I have tried to keep emotion out of the blog and instead give you a sense of what hoops you will jump through to do an out of state and international adoption. This may seem disjointed as you do not have all the details of what has happened to date but my cup runneth over and this is vent time. I really like our Adoption Agency. We spent a lot of time back-grounding them, finding out where they live and even meeting a the chief big wig for a protracted breakfast meeting. Unfortunately our latest handler is just not as quick and on top of things as our other representatives.

Last month I got that yellow package from The Agency that had more forms and paperwork to gather for our trip. One of the key items is the Visa. As I stated before it is all done on-line. The only thing missing are passport photos. I sent a quick email to our handler to let them know that I was going to drop the application in the mail. Wow, I actually got a response. Don't mail it yet, it might expire before you go. Huh?? We are going in October right? – that is 3 months away and the visa is good for 6. Why are you saying we won't be going for more than 6 months from NOW? What is the hold up? According to the calculations we were on-track. Well did you see the e-mail about the timeline? Yep NOC/ Court Clearance/ICPC GO! According to what The Agency has told us, and you are a representative of said Agency, we should be getting the call to go sometime in October. Well, the NOC process hasn't started yet! WHAT?? You told us that as soon as we got the Dossier over to India that it would go tot eh NOC board. Yeah but… great here come the excuses… due to the needed updated material it was decided to not go to NOC blah, blah, blah, …we just gave it to CARA for NOC review Blah, blah, blah. All I get are excuses. You know Mr. Agency it would have been helpful if you had COMMINUCATED this to us earlier. Mr. Agency has not been forthcoming nor very helpful in keeping us in the loop. Did I mention that this is our 4^th handler? So I tried to pin them down on a new rough estimate based on their past experience of adoptions in India. Obviously when to start the clock got us hung up.

NOC clearance:

The non-objection clearance (NOC, I defined it before but who knows if you remember it) has been on the slow side. This clearance comes from CARA in Delhi for the child to be approved to be adopted by your family.

Start 01JUL08 complete 23SEP08 (assume 12 weeks could be more)

Court clearance:

After the NOC clearance the paperwork with attorneys head over to the Indian Courts. This takes anywhere from 6-9 weeks after NOC for court to clear.

Start 23SEP08 complete 25NOV08

The court papers are then translated from Hindi to English and sent to The Agency which is not in the state of California. Time: 2-3 weeks

start 25NOV08 complete 09DEC08

Crossing State Lines:

Oh no, you want to work with an agency that is not licensed in the state of California. You do know that inter-state bureaucracy just adds time? Now you have more papers that need to be filled, supposedly this is done without our involvement but do you think they will be on top of the game. Any chance of getting them prefilled? Based on past experience I doubt it. It is not that tough as all my docs for American Embassy in India are already prefilled and I passed them off to The Agency for review). I doubt The Agency will prefill the forms but will instead wait until they actually have the court papers in hand. Well that will add a day or two to the delay. Interstate trafficking involves an ICPC,

Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children:

An interstate compact, or agreement, that has been enacted into law by all 50 states in the United States, and the District of Columbia, which controls the lawful movement of children from one state to another for the purposes of adoption. Both the originating state, where the child is born, and the receiving state, where the adoptive parents live and where the adoption of the child will take place, must approve the child's movement in writing before the child can legally leave the originating state. This Compact regulates the interstate movement of both foster children and adoptive children.

Start 16DEC2008 complete 6JAN2009 (Estimated time frame)

Did you notice that they conveniently left out a week? Hey what are you guys going to be doing from the 9^th to the 16^th? Oh that's right Christmas shopping.

Once the IPC is completed and The Agency confirms that our daughter has a passport then we will be allowed to travel. It looks like I have to ask them to make sure that that gets started when the Indian court complete their business.

What Next?

I have been told that adopting is a test of patience. I think I am getting "D". You can read it in the tone of this posting. It could have been raised had our handler been a better communicator. It is not due to a lack on our part as when ever we have a question we send it up and usually get a response a 1 to 3 days later. But that is just the problem the only time we hear from our handler is when we initiate it. Based on no info we think everything was on schedule and on plan. Our previous handlers did not act this way and when they did not hear from us in a week, as we were getting our dossier together they would drop us a line to see what our progress was.

What next? – gotta pull out some of USCIS documentation. Some of it has expiration dates on it. Miss a date and you have to apply $700 or so more again. Depending on the form you may be able to get an extension. Fingerprints have a definitive drop dead date – no extension. Cha‑ching close to $200 for that. No way around that hit.

Is there a Silver Lining?

Nope. Maybe. Well she won't be here for Christmas so I don't have to buy her any Christmas gifts. She will miss all the crush of humanity and festivities that happen during that time. Then again India has some rather large festive holidays, not sure if our daughter gets to partake in any of them – I doubt it. In either case a whole bunch of strange relatives will not be trying to paw at her. And it gives us time to defend her against her relatives, one of which has taken to calling her "That girl from India". Yes this a very, very, close relative who knows that she already has a name and in fact was named before we even started the adoption process. SHIELDS UP! We remind them that that is our daughter they are talking about and she has a name to please use it. And finally, "Daddy's Little Tax Deduction", Google that one, will not be on this years taxes.

The wife says that airfares should be low because it will be after the holiday season. I hope the fares drop but I doubt they will.

Summary

• Visa – On hold until 4 months after we have received NOC
• USCIS Form I-600A once you submit this and all the paperwork the USCIS sends back form I-171H. Form I-171H is valid for 18 months from the date of completion of advanced processing (valid until Jun 2009). Form I-600 (sign it at the American Embassy with child in possession) must be accepted before June 2009.
• USCIS Finger Prints – expire November 9^th , CHA-CHING, would have been nice if The Agency told us up front to expect to pay for fingerprinting 2x.

je

Waiting Game

What can go worng? Well, spell check for one. What happened last month. Snafu with The Agency. Due to certain things being added into the Home Study which we were told would not be put in, they were put in we have had to modify the Home Study and create a couple of more documents for the notary and apostille process. We have been informed that these new/modified documents are now on their way to India.

In the mail we got a Yellow folder that has , yep, more forms to fill out. One is the USCIS form I-864. No reason that we could not have gotten this earlier, I did not know about it from my earlier wandering through the USCIS Adoption Web pages. This form is a How much $$ do you make in a year form. You will bump this up against the I-864P which changes each year and is the poverty line. You need to make 125% of poverty or have other proof of your net worth. If you do your taxes jointly then you will want to get a copy of form I-864A. You can prefill them but unless you want to get another notary don't sign them until you are told to do so, which will be at the embassy consulate in… India for us. Now the forms are a bit twisted because they ask for your "total income…as reported on my Federal tax return" . Huh? Form I-864 is for the Sponsor of which it is limited to a single entity, either the husband or the wife. Form I‑864A is for Household Member, in our case either the husband or wife that is not mentioned on the previous form. Yes I am trying to write this as confusingly as the forms are. If you can get through this paragraph then you can get through the forms. I-864A also asks for the total income as reported. Duh ain't that smart? If you file a joint tax return then there is only one total income that is reported. here is my solution:

1. prefill the I-864 & I-864a as much as possible but leave these odd sections alone until we need to sign.

2. prefill the forms in total, as much as possible, and see if I did it right when we get there. If not then pull out forms from 1.

3. If all else fails bring a total blank form with us.

Read the instructions a few times as you may need to bring notarised copies of pay stubs, tax forms, W2's.

Finally I have a full up version of Adobe Acrobat 5.0, yeah it is a few years old and the latest version of the free Adobe Reader. I-864 will open in both programs. In the reader you can even fill in the form and save it. Form I-864A will only open in the reader and you cannot save. Weird. So why do bring this up? I have been working on an application for grant $$ to fund this adoption. One of the 30 page applications is a pdf file that you download, print out and then fill in. I have bad scripting and the wife's hand is like a surgeon, steady but you can't read a thing she writes. I took a couple of hours to create form fields in the pdf so that, at my leisure, I could fill it in and have it legible. In the full up Adobe I can type in my answers and save them. In the reader version I can only type it then print it but am unable to save what was typed. How do I get this document set up so that another applicants can save the data using the reader, like form I-864?

Visa application – haven’t started it yet but we were told to do so. This is done on-line and once the 39 plus questions are answered it loads up the application for you to print out and send to the consulate in San Francisco.

WEWO (pronounced We –Woe) – there are a few parenting classes that we have to take. We have done 2 so far. One was offered through our agency and the other is/was a collaboration with another. The wife has talked a few times with our social worker who suggested a few books. She has just about finished with one and whooo weee is it a doozie. It is basically a treatise on what happens to children that are abused, neglected and tortured.

Well that is odd, my wooden chair at work just squirted out a ball bearing. Dang, when I bought the chair the wheels had been removed. I went to the equivalent of the Big Orange Box and got 4 new wheels. I purposely purchased wheels that were made in the USA. What did I get for my efforts – 6 months use. Back to our story…

WEWO is not as bad but it is similar. It prepares you for what you may encounter with your child. It arms you with a resource of if your child is behaving in a particular way it may be due to acts from the past. Some creepy things may have happened to your child before you get her/him. They may manifest themselves early on or maybe when hey reach teen-hood.

Speaking of the wee one. Some new friends of ours just picked up their child form the orphanage that our child is in. They took a few pics of our child as she was opening up a book that we sent along with a picture book of us, her new phamily and home. She is a bit malnourished as she is almost as high as our 2 ½ year old but weighs as much as our 7 month old. I think she is undergoing a growth spurt her head is out of proportion to her body.

je