A Clear Sign

It is the CCAA’s job to match all of the available orphans in China with their adoptive families. Many people have asked why the youngest children available from China are 6 months old—why not younger? It is because it takes some time to get these children paper-ready and then send their dossiers to the CCAA, just as it took us about 6 months to get our dossier together. The children’s dossiers are in one queue and the adoptive families dossiers are in another. The child that the CCAA matches us with is greatly dependent on the types of children next up for placement. Here is what we have read about the matching process from several different websites.

First, they review the baby dossiers and make sure there are no issues with them. Then they count up all of the baby dossiers that are eligible for matching that month and then look to see how far this stack will go in the parent dossiers without sending out a partial day of LID’s, and they pull all of those parent files.

Secondly, they match orphanages up with agencies. For example, this orphanage has six babies, this agency has six families; these two orphanages are in the same province and have a total of 12 babies, this agency has 12 families, etc.

Thirdly, they start matching individual babies to individual families. They first look for something that stands out: a matching birthday, a baby who looks a lot like a parent, or a baby who likes music and a parent who teaches music. Several matching people have stated they match by bone structure of the baby’s face and the parents’ faces (this is why parents send their passport photos, so they can compare our mug shot with the baby’s mug shot). Some have stated that they have used Chinese astrology also. Once they’ve matched the obvious matches they then start to look at things like age of child requested. The age requested is not a priority for them, because they feel they are matching families and not filling orders. But at this point they do try to satisfy the particular requests of the applicants. Our request was for a baby aged 9-14 months. Most people ask for the youngest child possible; therefore, in most groups, the youngest couples will get the youngest children (babies) in that group and the older families will tend to get the older children (toddlers). Keep in mind that the youngest families will be 30 years old and the oldest families will be 50 based on China’s adoption requirements. Therefore, we are on the younger side.

Ultimately, it is God who will do the matching! We have prayed for His hand in all of this and trust in Him to work through the CCAA. He has known and planned all along whom our baby would be. Psalm 68:5-6a says, “A father of the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in His holy habitation. God sets the solitary in families.” We can’t wait to see who He has chosen to place into our family!

Labels: China Center of Adoption Affairs