Why Vietnam?

When we tell people that we are in the process of adopting internationally from Vietnam, often the question why did we choose Vietnam comes up. We did not go into this saying let’s adopt from Vietnam, really it was just the country that seemed to work out best for us.
When we started talking about international adoption we discussed adopting from an Eastern European country because my family background is European or from Asia because Erwin was born in Malaysia. The other place that we considered was India because a child from India would look like us. India was quickly ruled out because unless you are doing a relative adoption it is very difficult to adopt from India and none of the adoption agencies that we contacted would do an India adoption. China is a country that seems to be synonymous with international adoption but in researching it more the wait times have really increased over the last few years. At one point I was hearing that an adoption from China took about a year but then we stared hearing about three years and even more recently I have heard of waits of up to 6-7 years. So the wait time really deterred us from China.

So when we first enlisted the services of our adoption agency we actually indicated that we were interested in the Bulgaria program or the Philippines program. As it turned out the Philippines program got put on hold until their government could complete at least half of the referrals that were in progress or waiting, basically stalling any new applications. And with a bit more research I found out that in order to complete a Bulgaria adoption we would have to travel to Bulgaria twice. Once at the time of referral to meet and accept the child and then you had to leave the child there while about three more months of paperwork took place before you could return to take the child home. We did not want the logistics and added expense of travelling twice as well as I thought it would kill me to meet a child, my child, and then have to leave my child in an orphanage for three months. Just too hard emotionally.

So then we found out that our agency was running a Vietnam program. They estimated the wait time to be about a year and we qualified. Although after reading so many blogs where families have waited over two years for their Vietnam adoptions to be finalized I am not so sure about the timeline, but we are here now!

Soon after we signed onto the Vietnam waitlist our agency decided to shut down their Vietnam program. They suspect that the Vietnamese government may stop international adoptions soon (due to needing to make some changes to their procedures) so our agency is not adding anyone else to the waitlist in anticipation of Vietnam closing. They hope to get everyone who is waiting, home with babies before it closes. Of course, we need to remember that it is not a sure thing. The Vietnamese government could close international adoptions at any time and then we would have to start from scratch again with another country.

So at the moment Vietnam it is. At this point Erwin and I are cautiously optimistic! Keep you fingers crossed for us.