Yesterday was a weird day... many folks are waiting for the October appointment list.

Brief recap: The SDA (Ukrainian government adoption authority) is the only organization who can provide children's referrals. Families must travel to Ukraine for an appointment for the referral. Right now only families who filed a dossier between Feb 2004 and March 2006 are getting appointments. Some of dossiers are very old for various reasons including a shutdown/slowdown in Ukrainian adoptions in 2005. The SDA isn't taking new dossiers until after Jan 2007.

An appointment list contains a family's registration number with their date. It looks like

THIS IS JUST AN EXAMPLE. I DON'T ACTUALLY HAVE THE APPOINTMENT LIST

14010 Вересень 4 2006
15496 Вересень 5 2006
........
14440 Вересень 25 2006
14466 Вересень 25 2006

Most of the "newer" dossiers are filed by families who want to adopt their hosted child or sibling of their child. The appointment list will contain sequential numbers. But it also contains higher registration numbers. These are families adopting the hosted child/sibling.

(hosting = Family pays travel expenses for child to visit the United States)

Many of the September appointments were given to Italian families. This explains why American families didn't get a lot of September appointments. They weren't as far behind as the Italians.

Sidenote: Turns out the SDA was issuing appointments without checking if a dossier is valid. They only check the dossier's expiration dates 1 week before the appointment date. If 1 document has expired the entire dossier is dropped into the mail to the adoptive family. More then 1 Italian family has shown up at the SDA only to find out their dossier was on its way to Italy via mail. That would really suck. Everyone needs to stay on top of their paperwork's expiration dates and get updates turned in.

The SDA has posted the September appointment list on their walls. The October appointment list was suppposed to be posted 2 weeks ago.

So the weirdness.... From different adoptive families the October appointment list was and was not on the wall yesterday. The reports were coming from families in the SDA at different times.

Anyway everyone is fairly certain the October list is posted now. And it only contains low numbers (from 14,100 to 14,877) up to October 19, 2006. Families who are adopting older and/or siblings of their current children MAY be added later this week.

RUMOR ALERT: This is listed as a rumor because I have seen it in one place. And it is from a facilitator that I don't know. I waiting to see if any of the other facilitators will confirm it. The rumor...SDA may close the last 2 weeks of October to organize. Hmmmm.... seems like they keep doing that (close, reorganize, close reorganize).


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