(Written by Chicagomama. Archived here with permission.)
The CCAA.
If this was a Jet Li film – you would now see some seriously fierce practice of wushu. Men and women doing things with dossiers that you’ve never seen done before. In rooms bathed with appropriately moody yet spiritual lighting.
But this is my blog…and every picture I have ever seen of the CCAA shows a pretty innocuous, typical office building in Beijing whose rooms are bathed in flourescent lighting. And, unfortunately, I don’t think the CCAA is widely regarded by adoptive parents as a ‘beacon of hope’ – which is just too bad – since it would play into a more positive stereotype of Chinese culture than the one currently being hype: that of the inscrutable, cunning Asian bureaucracy that lives to mess with the Noble White Man by means of ambiguity, misdirection and disdain.
Though – a case could also be made that neither stereotype is very helpful or truthful…and we should just stick to the facts. hmm, let’s try that.
*****************************************************************
While the Director of the Orphanage prepared and submitted my paperwork to the CCAA, so that they could find me a family…halfway across the world (in the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA), a family of a mama and baba dreamed of having a child.
This family felt that their child was in China, and they worked with an adoption agency called CAWLI (China Adoption With Love, Inc) to send their dossier to the CCAA asking to be matched to a little girl who would become their daughter.
The CCAA works very hard to find families for children. When parental dossiers are sent to them – there is a three stage process the CCAA goes through to find the best parents possible.
Stage One: Translation The CCAA needs to make sure that all documents in a dossier sent are translated into Mandarin. The workers in the Translation Room make sure that all the parts of the parental dossier are translated in Mandarin. Our dossier (from America) was written in English and so all the paperwork needed to be re-written in Mandarin so that the CCAA workers could read it. Dossiers from other countries are sent in other languages – Dutch, Swedish, Spanish…they all need to be re-worded into Mandarin so that all the CCAA workers can read them. Parental dossiers have a lot of pieces to them and translating them can take a long time.
Stage Two: Review After a dossier is translated, it goes to the Review Room. The CCAA has a set of rules that adoptive parents must follow to be able to adopt a child from China. These rules are there to protect China’s children and try to make sure that only the most qualified parents are allowed to adopt. In the Review Room, CCAA workers read through the documents in hopeful parent dossiers and check to make sure that all the paperwork is in order. If there is a problem with a dossier – this is where it would be found. The CCAA would then ask for more information regarding that set of parents and sometimes decides that some prospective parents will not be allowed to adopt from China.
Most parental dossiers that are sent follow all the rules and regulations of the CCAA and are approved.
Stage Three: Matching In this final stage – families who have passed review are sent to the Matching Room. In this room are all the dossiers of children whose information has been sent by their SWIs to find them a forever family. The workers in this room have the very important task of matching the right family to each child. No one knows exactly how families are chosen for each child – but many people think that the CCAA workers are pretty amazing in how good a job they do.
We don’t know what specifically caught the eye of the CCAA workers, but somehow they decided to match me with my Mama and Baba.
After matching me with my new parents, the CCAA sent a packet of information (called a REFERRAL) back to the U.S. with 4 pictures of me and documents that told my Mommy and Daddy about my life and my development at the Orphanage.