Two Waiting Lists

Most countries/agencies will maintain two adoption waiting lists.  One is a waiting list of parents who are waiting for kids to pop out of the labyrinth that is that country's adoption system, and the other is a waiting child list.  


Out of the tens of millions of orphans in India, only a few children a month are made available for adoption internationally.  I know, that doesn't make a ton of sense to me, either.  I understand wanting to make sure kids don't end up in slavery or the sex trade, but to me it seems that national pride (we can take care of our own orphans, thank you) is overriding getting these children out of institutions and into loving homes.  Ugh...*


Anyway, its a supply and demand thing.  There are more adoptive parents than the respective countries are willing to make available, so there has to be a waiting list for adoptive parents.  

So, when a child becomes available to adopt internationally, they get offered to the first family in the waiting list.  If they pass on the child, then they are offered to the next family.  And so on.  Sometimes either no family will take them, and then they end up on the other list I mentioned earlier, the waiting child list.  This is a list of kids that are immediately available for adoption.  Some kids end up on this list immediately due to medical issues or age (most families want babies, not older kids) or something else.


Our two kids are on the waiting child list already because they are siblings, and they need a family willing to adopt them both so they won't be split up.  Hopefully this means that some other legal and court processes in India can be shortcut, but I'm not sure.  I do know the waiting gets harder once you have names and faces to think about rather than a theoretical child that you'll find out about later on.  Now its personal, you know?






-------------------------------------------------------------------
*India is not the only place where this happens, of course.  There seems to be a pattern where a country decides to do something about its orphan problem and throws open its doors to international adoption.  A ton of kids get adopted, which alarms certain parts of the country's population, for whatever reason.  National pride, or whatever.  So, they start closing the doors and slowing down the process, until the flow of kids is reduced to a trickle.  And in some cases shut down completely.