Jul
30
Another day, another game of telephone tag and talking ’round and ’round with our agency about our adoption timeline.
We’re frustrated. We’re tired of always hearing bad news, never good, with respect to timelines. We’re tired of being the family who is — randomly, from what we can tell — getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop while other families get things done expeditiously.
We want it all to be done.
I have to be honest. If we had been sat down, that very first day, and told that information would come to us in dribs and drabs, and that timelines we were told would be wrong, almost without exception, by 100% each time, and that we could often talk to two different people and get two completely different answers on just about everything despite them being in the same office and dealing with the same country… well, I think we might have just passed on the whole adoption thing. Because, right now, despite having a beautiful daughter waiting for us that we would absolutely not trade for anything on this earth, we are not in the best frame of mind about how things are going with her adoption.
We’re really, really frustrated. We have nowhere to go with this frustration, and no way to act on our own behalf to just Get. Something. Done. We feel like we’ve been mismanaged in a lot of respects. We feel like we are being stonewalled, rather randomly, and yet nobody knows why or has any idea how to fix it.
And we are stymied as to why some relatively simple bits of bureaucracy suddenly and randomly take so much longer to get done, and nobody seems to bat an eye.
I spoke with a friend today. “You’re a businessman,” I said. “If you told your customers that you would do some work for them in X time, and then each time you were wrong by 100%, would you still be in business? Would clients still come to you if you kept pushing your dates back and things were not getting done and all you could tell them is ‘I understand, I understand’ and ‘we can’t really tell you why’?”
He said, “It depends on the nature of the business. If I am the only person offering this service, people don’t have a choice.”
And I am not saying it’s just my agency. From what I can tell, it’s a problem in agencies everywhere. Adoption as a whole has this problem.
And I am not saying the people we deal with aren’t good people. They’re very nice, they care about the children under their care and they seem to want to help their adoptive parents. But nice isn’t enough sometimes.
What adoption in Canada needs is some good, solid project managers. People who get in, set timelines, expedite the bureaucracy, and do whatever it takes to get things done. It needs to have some people versed in good communication. It needs streamlining of procedures.
But it won’t happen. Not in our lifetime, anyway. Certainly not in time to speed up our travel date to bring our child home.
