notes from the globe

I was looking around today for any signs of life in Vietnam, and found two baffling updates. In Ireland, the two agencies that are licensed to start processing adoptions under the new law held an info session about 10 days ago. Apparently they said that Vietnam will accept their first dossiers in March. Which would mean, in my mind (a fair place) that all the families from all the other countries who were waiting their turn before the 2010 shutdown (and there are 1000s of them) will complete their adoptions before March (i.e., within the next 2 weeks). I'm not even going to entertain that those 1000s of people would be bumped for new dossiers (although I believe there are some Irish families who have been in limbo since Vietnam-Irish adoptions stopped a few years before they stopped for everyone else).

One of the bloggers in France that I follow posted that there are rumours that Vietnam plans to have the "legacy" cases (i.e., those who lost referrals when Vietnam shut down, and those whose dossiers were logged in before the shutdown) completed by June. I don't know if this means just her agency's legacy cases, all of France's legacy cases, or all of them in all receiving countries, but I got the impression that it meant the global ALL. Again, it's just a rumour and the families she knows don't seem to have too much faith in what they are hearing, considering June is just a few months away, there are still many of these cases, and the regular program has barely started moving after all this time.

Also,on the more realistic side, the Canadian agency Children's Bridge indicated in their February monthly update that Vietnam continues to ask if their families will accept special needs children, and that they expect the regular program to remain slow.

I don't mean to discourage people; I just believe that waiting families deserve to know as much information as possible so they can make the best decisions in the circumstances. I don't have any idea how different countries, agencies and families could have such wildly different updates, but this is what seems to happen when a source country is silent.

On a personal note, this has been a long, difficult winter on many fronts so my bags are packed and I'm heading south tomorrow. I hope that I'll return from the islands and jungles of Belize to some JOYful news that good things are happening in the east!