OmegaMom

Thinking over the experiences that Chew had in her adoption (and disruption) in China, I have to say it’s like looking at your reflection in a fun-house mirror.  You know the kind–where a skinny person sees the reflection as squat and fat, and a larger person can get in front of another mirror and see themselves stretched long and thin, and everything is distorted from reality.  Her experience was so totally different than ours.

When we decided to adopt, I researched a whole slew of agencies, and kept coming up with CCAI.  There were no complaints.  When I asked people to email me offlist with their experiences, everyone was–without a single exception–extremely happy with that agency.  At the time, CCAI was the only agency that had a website that broke down the costs to adopt specifically, with a description of each step and an explanation of the costs.  In addition, they were one of the least expensive.  So we went with CCAI.

We got our dossier together…we sent it in…we got our DTC date(nowadays, it’s the log-in date which is more important)…and we waited.

And waited.

Fourteen months later, we got our referral.  Our dotter-to-be was from Guilin, in the Guangxi province (okay, the Guangxi Autonomous Region), and we were going to meet her in Nanning.

I read Chew’s story, and her view of Nanning and the process there is so diametrically opposed to our experience.

Her guide was horrible.  We had the absolutely most fabulous facilitator in China anyone could ever ask for…Michael was sweet and kind and efficient and funny.  We got off the plane in Nanning, and were greeted by Michael and the bus driver.  In the bus on the way to Nanning, Michael immediately started teaching us some basic phrases and nursery songs in Mandarin.  He had handouts for us–a list of each of the people in our group, plus their email addresses, their child-to-be’s name and birthdate; a handout with the pinyin words to the phrases and songs he was teaching us.  One of the couples were adopting a toddler, a girl about 2.5 years old.  She knew what was happening, and she was not happy about it.  Michael spent extra time with this family, helping them out, talking to the girl in Mandarin, working with the whole family to make sure everything worked out.

Her introduction to the civil affairs office in Nanning was odd–they went in the back door in an odd fashion; we were driven to the front, everyone took lots of pictures, we went into the lobby (it was in a hotel), went up to the third floor, and into the very same room she describes, the one with the dais and the flags.  That’s where we were introduced to our babies.  There may have been signs about no videotaping, but I can assure you that no-one saw them, or if they did, none of us paid attention to them!

As Theresa said in the comments, the Mildew Hotel that Chew describes is probably the Majestic.  I have to say, this is the one thing in her tale that is pretty much the same; the Majestic is not very majestic.  I recognized it immediately from her description.  It’s older and somewhat shabby–but it’s considered a four-star hotel by China because it has an outdoor swimming pool and some old tennis courts!

The experiences diverge so much from that point on that it’s hard for me to take in.  It seems like she encountered “the perfect storm”–a bad guide in Nanning, a baby who was sick, a lack of communication from her agency, a client in shock and dealing with culture shock as well.  Carosgram made some excellent points in her comment:

I have been wondering if after having just spent 4 months in a 3rd world country and bringing home her first baby, was she rested (physically, emotionally, spiritually) enough to take on another child? Was she so excited about the possibility to add to her family without another long wait that she didn’t really evaluate if she would be able to meet the needs of two children who were being taken from their homes and cultures to live with people who didn’t even speak their language?…I’m thinking that because she was so excited she didn’t even know how exhausted she was from the first adoption and didn’t feel she could pass up the opportunity to add to her family. I’m thinking that when she got to China she suffered from culture shock and then had to deal with the conflicting needs of her 1st child and the one she went their to adopt. I’m thinking she did not really have enough time to analyze what adding another child to the newly formed family would do to her 1st daughter. I’m thinking that she felt overwhelmed with the idea of trying to meet the needs of the new child and came to realize that she didn’t have the inner resources to do a good job for both children. I wish that her husband had been able to be there for her to give her the support she so badly needed during her journey.

The long and short of it is that I pretty much agree with Carosgram from start to finish.  I would add that it seems to me there was a bad fit between her and the Chinese culture, so very different from the hispanic culture of Guatemala which she had been soaked in for four months previously.

It is obviously a very good idea to pin down what your agency would do in similar circumstances.  Like the Boy Scout motto:  Be Prepared.

But please–do not think this is the norm in adopting from China.