Visit to Chinese Center for Adoption Affairs

A unique opportunity of this trip is that we visited the Chinese Center for Adoption Affairs and BLAS (Bridge of Love Adoption Service). Anyone who has adopted from China is very familair with CCAA. It is the government office that controls the adoption process and does the "matches" - decides which children will be placed with which families. We visited the offices of CCAA, the agency that coordinated this trip. We actually were able to go inside the match room and see the files on the shelves of all the waiting families. We saw a file from "Adoptions Together" which we are very familiar with from their work in the Washington/Baltimore area. The wait for adoption is now THREE years, we are told. The staff was very friendly and informative. We were told that when doing the matches they look at the pictues of the families and try to match a child that looks a little like the parents. At BLAS all the kids received a calligraphy lesson and a music lesson to practice a song for a ceremony that was held the next day at CCAA. Also some parents saw a video made of a previous reunion trip in the fall at Fuling. The video was very moving and there were many tears, especially the parts of the video that showed the visit to the orphanage. At the ceremony the next morning we were greeted by a huge welcome with speeches from different government officials including the Chinese Vice Minister of Civil Affairs, Dou Tupei - a high ranking government official in China. We were welcomed by a slideshow on a big screen in the auditorium that displayed all the family photos that we had sent in prior to our trip. We also saw an amazing dance performed by some of the staff at BLAS - hard to believe they were not professional dancers, they must have been practicing for a long time. Then all our kids got on stage to sing to song they had practiced the day before. They were really cute and did a great job. All the families had their pictures taken with the minister and received a beautiful gift - a glass cube with a 3-D image of the great wall on the inside. After there were TV crews interviewing some of the families. It was a fun and really meaningful visit to BLAS and CCAA.