by Shaggy » Thu Sep 16, 2010 6:41 pm
Венгертэй зовлон нэгтэй нэг америк залуу ингэж бичиж бас бодож үзмээр л юм байна!
OK, I should really be more clear here. It's not adoption that I hate -- I absolutely love adoption itself -- it's the process that I hate.
Several friends have been in "the process" of adopting children for over a year, some for over three years. They've gone through the applications and home studies and money games ... and now they wait. And wait. Some have made multiple overseas trips to visit the children they're scheduled to adopt, and the children ask when they can go home with them. It's really heartbreaking.
Meanwhile, the bureaucrats and lawyers drag things to a near-halt. They want more money. They want more paperwork. And because of backlogs, corruption and inefficiencies, that paperwork doesn't get processed in a timely manner. They need special permission to get this done. They need another application to get that done. And then they need more money to process that paperwork.
My wife and I would love to adopt a baby. But it's disheartening to hear the horror stories -- $10,000 to $20,000 of palm-greasing and bureaucracy and travel expenses, and finalizing the adoption gets pushed out another two months. Four months. Six months. An insecure bureaucrat plays power games, and the Russian adoption falls through. Let's adopt from Liberia. OK, for whatever reason, that just fell through. How about China or Uganda? Nope, they just imposed new adoption policies that make it all but impossible. Let's try Haiti. All right, they now need a "presidential pardon" in order to allow the kids to join their adoptive parents (seriously -- a "presidential pardon").
My prayer is that this process be streamlined to favor decent people who want to adopt and who want to be adopted. And that greed and the lust for power become institutionally prohibited.