Our Meeting With Korean Adoption Agency

It is a definite YES!!!! I needed to hear it in person to fully understand at what level the yes was coming from. The new assistant director for the country of Korea, which is also the director's daughter, had given an unofficial yes some time ago but needed to pass it during a board meeting in Korea and that occurred Monday.
We filed our pre-application and now need to send in our official application to be put on the waiting list. If no one else sends in an application before us, we will be number 31. (This is so much different from the VN process where none of this information was made available.) Another difference is how paper work is done. There is no dossier submitted to the Korean government. They only want a homestudy and immigration paperwork. If you've ever read a homestudy, there is nothing left unsaid, described or investigated...if you ever want to trust someone...find someone who has had a homestudy. The agency will compile and keep the "dossier" like paperwork which essentially is required for the homestudy anyway. This paperwork doesn't need to be done until you hit the teen's on the waiting list......except in our case...of course. Since I have my immigration paperwork filed with the State Department to obtain a visa for an orphan, I can't let that expire. So, I must renew it after 18 months which will be Novemember 2008. To renew it, I need a homestudy update to be done. To do a homestudy update, I have to do all my paperwork later this summer to generate a homestudy update which will be submitted to the State Department. Some of this is time sensitive and could potentially need to be done again before I receive a referral which would add us to 3 times for some of this paperwork.
Time of the referral? They give the time frame of 12-18 months. A referral comes into the agency in Colorado and they look down the list and match that child with the first family this child matches based on requests of age, gender, health conditions, etc.
The positives of Korea adoption vs. other countries. They have been open for international adoption for 54 years. The father agency that our agency works through has been in business with Korea for 34 years and our agency for 14 years. Korea and China are the most stable programs in international adoption. (Our agency's founders have adopted 28 children...Christie is one of them.) Even with the positives, I am guarded in getting too excited with the disaster in Vietnam but very optimistic.