Picking a placement agency

At this time there are 60 agencies that place children from China. How do we pick which one to have our partnership of bringing home our daughter? After much research I narrowed the choices to seven. That is in itself a huge task. But the seven are all 5 star, highly recommended agencies. We can only use one. Some of the differences between the agencies are:

Group Travel
Group travel has fellowship but groups only leave on certain days so you might have to wait a month to catch the next outgoing group. Groups have a specific daily itinerary including times to be leaving for activities. Due to some personal health issues we can't always have a set schedule of times to leave.

Scheduling and Paying for Travel
Most, but not all agencies expect you to pay for your own international flights to the province where your child is located. There are large differences between the fees of in country travel. Some agencies are known or suspected of marking up the hotels and in country flights above cost. You need to fly from the province after 2-3 days to Guangzhou previously known as Canton, in southern China near Hong Kong. In Guangzhou you stay to do paperwork for approximately 10 days. Then you fly back to the states from Hong Kong or perhaps you fly to Beijing and international from there. Your in country agency fees usually include flight from province to Guangzhou, hotels, entrance fees to a few attractions, guide and driver.

Designated List or only Shared List
As I discussed on a previous blog some agencies have designated lists as well as access to the shared list. Can an agency match you as well without having access to as many children as other agencies? The shared list at this time has around 2000 children listed. Every month a list of 50-300 new children are added to the shared list.

Keeping in mind we are only considering seven agencies that are highly rated so any of them are no doubt great we have to choose one. There are other differences that were not as important to us but other parents might give more weight. Like when your fees to agency are due in the process or ability to wire orphanage donation/fee.

We have chosen CAWLI
China Adoption With Love, Inc.

If you want to read about the agency we have chosen to be our partner in bringing this addition to our family their address is cawli.org.

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I love the idea of having a place to share my thoughts and frustrations of this process but finding the time is hard. I'll try to update the blog from my Iphone. Perhaps that will be easier than finding time to write at the desk. It will however make for shorter posts due to the lack of keyboard.