The Homestudy
The first paperwork to be completed is the homestudy. It is during the homestudy that a licensed social worker evaluates your ability to be good parents and to provide an appropriate environment for child rearing. China requires that you have four visits with a social worker. Once the visits are complete, the social worker provides you with your written homestudy and whether or not they approve you for adopting.
For our homestudy we had to provide the following information:
- Copies of our birth certificates, marriage certificate, any divorce decrees
- Financial form, copies of W-2s, copy of our most recent tax return
- Medical clearance forms, employment verification letters (notarized)
- Reference letters (notarized), Criminal record checks
With this information and the results of the sessions with our Social Worker, our homestudy is produced. China has a specific list of questions that they want answered by the Social Worker and this document creates a short story of our lives that is used for this purpose. During the interviews we discussed each of the specific questions required by China and our responses were then recorded by our Social Worker and documented in the homestudy. The end result, is that we got approval from our Social Worker to adopt! If you can't get approval documented in your homestudy, you can't proceed with an adoption, so this was critical!
INS Approval
Since we are adopting internationally, we had to submit an I600A Application for Advance Processing to the INS. This is for the US to grant us approval to adopt a foreign orphan and bring her back as a US citizen. A copy of our homestudy is sent with the application for review and we must also be fingerprinted by the FBI. Once our fingerprints clear and our application and homestudy are reviewed, we are issued an I-171 Certificate of Approval. This document expires in 18 months, so it needs to be the last document we obtain prior to sending our dossier to China.
The Dossier
Our dossier is the actual paperwork that is sent to China by our adoption agency (AWAA) for processing. The dossier is first reviewed by our agency to ensure that it meets the requirements set up by the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA). The dossier consists of the following information:
- Adoption Petition
- Birth Certificates, Marriage Certificate, Divorce Decrees
- Financial Statement, Medical Statement
- Employment Verification, Criminal Record Checks
- Homestudy Report
- I-171
- Photos
Notarization, Certification, and Authentication
Now the red tape...all documents must be notarized unless they are issued by the State (like Birth Certificates, etc). Then all documents must be certified by the Secretary of State in the State of issue. Then all of the documents have to go to the US State Department and the Chinese Embassy for Authentication.
Agency Review and submission to CCAA
Once our dossier completed the Authentication process, it was sent to our adoption agency for review. We had a perfect submission and needed to do no additional work!! We were assigned to Group 102 and our dossier was mailed from AWAA on October 8, 2001 and was logged in with CCAA on October 16, 2001.
