First eye opening fact: Majority of orphans in China will never have a file written up on them. Orphanages write up files on children at their convenience and in no particular order.
There are 2 ways or types of children to consider adopting from China (CCCWA):
1) LID- Logged In Dossier File - Children whose files require that a family have their dossier completed and Logged In with CCCWA before they can be matched. Usually these are very young children with more minor or correctable medical needs and girls up to age 9 with minor to moderate medical needs. More girls are designated as “LID Files” than boys. *This is what we are doing.
2) Special Focus Files- are children that can be matched with families at any time during the adoption process, even before starting paperwork if their agency has determined they are eligible. These children have more moderate to severe special needs and are usually older.
Agency Designated/Specific File – CCCWA allows agencies to hold Special Focus files for 90 days to advocate for those children. In exchange for their efforts they are the only agency that can match those children during that time period. LID Files can only be held for 3 weeks and only when an agency has a partnership with the child’s orphanage. Our agency has partnerships with 8+ Chinese orphanages and receives these LID files.
When we completed our paperwork we went through a list of 100 or more special needs and prayerfully considered what our family would be comfortable accepting. We could check yes, no, or willing to consider. We had a lot of willing to considers! So now our agency has families that are logged in and waiting for matches...and they go through their lists and match based off of what we have requested and what files they are presented with...in the order of when families got logged into the system.
Our agency will call us when they receive a file that they feel would be a successful match for us and make the referral via phone call. We will get to review a short snippet of the child- and either accept or decline. Once we accept we will get a more in depth file and then wait for our Letter of Acceptance or LOA from CCCWA stating that we can adopt the particular child we matched with.
While the whole matching process is going on our dossier is being translated, reviewed, and then matched. We will receive notification of when our dossier makes it through each of those levels. Right now it is in translation.
Our agency says that a conservative wait time for our child is between 3-6 months. And so we wait. And we pray. And trust God's timing. Getting all of our ducks in a row is tedious and it often feels like we are controlling everything- but we know that God's got His hand on each and every portion of this adoption and we want to gain this blessing of a child no sooner or later than He has planned for us.
I hope this helps explain what the matching process looks like a bit more!
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