April 30th, 2009

As we continued our research on Internation adoption, we also started looking for an adoption agency. Unless you are Madonna, you need to use a Hague Certified country along with a country certified adoption agency here in the USA. So our search was two-fold. Find a country that met our requirements, and find an agency that did the same. Country was easy. India won't let you adopt unless you are of Indian descent. Scratch that off the list. Other countries didn't allow you to have a prior divorce, or you had to be married for at least 5 years, or when the adoption time came you had to stay in country for 45 days or more. So we just went down the list of countries and kept removing them from the list. As the list got shorter and shorter, only one country kept coming up...Bulgaria. It was relatively cheap (as compared to say, China), we met all the requirements, and it was starting to look really good. A couple of internet horror stories about the orphanages in former Soviet Block countries notwithstanding, it looked like we had found our country. The only drawback that we could find was the program itself. It was recently closed as Bulgaria worked toward gaining acceptance to the EU, and had just opened up, so basically it was a untested program. No one from the US had done an adoption there in years, so we had no idea what to expect...