Time for an Update

Well, China has again added another twist and turn to our Journey to Emma. It might be a good change or it might not be so good.
In our last post our agency had been waiting on the next batch of SN children to arrive. They had informed the families that are in this program that the delay was probably due to some lay-offs of wokrers at the Chinese government adoption office. We are still not sure that it has ever arrived though.
According to our agency CCAI, china has been implementing a new computer referral process for SN children and they have been apart of the process in helping work out the bugs over the last sveral years. It sounds like that the Chinese government adoption office finally decided to start using this computer referral process in February/March. (Sorry for the long explanation.)
So now 30+ agencies now have access to this new process and all see the same children that are available for adoption through the SN program. This basically means that all of the agencies see this list and can lock a childs file for a family in there agency. There has been muc controversy over this new process, and some agencies were posting the entire list of children over the internet. And of course our agency did not want to be involved with this new progam because of the competition that would arise from it. So they had told us they would continue to make referrals the way thaey have always been doing it.
After several more weeks of the list being put out over the internet. Families from our agency (as weel as us) were starting to get worked up about CCAI (our agency) not getting involved in this program. Phone calls and e-mails were being made into the WC (waiting child/SN) dept. So our agency finally found out from China that this new referral process was going to be the way all SN children would be referred.
Well to try and make a long story shorter, Our agency has had to change the way they find and make referrals. They say over time once they figure out the changes that have been made referrals will probably start to speed up through this process.
There are downfalls to the process though. When an agency locks in a file for a child the families only have 48 hours to make a decision to adopt the child or not. The 48 hr clock starts as soon as the file is locked by the agency, ( and they can be locked in at anytime, 0-24 hours a day ). So families don't have near the time it takes to have Doctors looks at the files or process the information in the files, etc., etc., etc.
We also used to track in a somewhat normal fashion how many families were receiving referrals each month, but now we will not be able to track that info at all. Because of some other new international rules that do not allow any families to share the info of there child on the Internet group chat rooms until after the family is "pre approved"to adopt that child from China.
So we don't know anymore than we did several weeks ago. Please pray for us, and our process as we take another turn in our long wait. We appreciate it so very much!!
We will post again when we know more information>