Made in Taiwan

"Please remember that change is the nature of international adoption. Families that have the best adoption experience are flexible and understanding of the changes that will inevitably occur."

This line has accompanied every e-mail we have received from our agency over the last few weeks. Boy, have they thrown us for a loop with this one. We could never have imagined the chain of events that has occurred.

Last Friday, our case worker advised us that the agency had just started a new program in Taiwan and that we were at the ideal point in the adoption process (having a nearly completed homestudy, but no paperwork sent to another country yet). A U.S. adoption agency that worked with a Taiwanese agency had gone bankrupt, leaving the Taiwanese agency looking for a new partner. They selected our agency. Currently, 4 infant boys between the ages of one and four months are waiting for a home, and all that is required initially is a completed homestudy. We have been given the wonderful opportunity to be one of the first four families to enroll in this program, who are expected to receive a referral almost immediately.

We took the weekend to ponder this option, formulate questions, and obtain answers, so that we could make an educated decision. We decided to go for it today after receiving the right answers.

So, e-mails have been flying between various parties to revise our homestudy report, which was just approved by our case worker yesterday for the Vietnam program. We have to dig through some additional records tonight and supply them to the social worker who completed our homestudy. But, most importantly, we received the following note form our case worker this afternoon, "[y]our application will be faxed to Taiwan today!!!"

Sometime while we are sleeping tonight, the agency in Taiwan will review our application. We could have a referral as early as this week, according to our case worker. We should definitely have it by Christmas, and may be traveling to finalize the adoption as early as May or June. I don't know that I can predict that this will all go off without a hitch, but I also don't think I can express how fortunate and joyous we are feeling right now.

There is more to tell, such as specifics features of this program that make it attractive. There are also feelings that this is happening faster than we expected, and a bit of amazement that we have been so fortunate -- as if we are being guided -- as well as the realistic awareness that not all of the changes that occur in international adoption are wonderful. So we will have to wait and see how things progress, and hope that the process continues to go as well as it has recently.