18 Dezember 2006
Things are changing fast in Ukraine...
This will be yet another post of the series “Things change frequently in Ukraine” :-/
Or maybe: :-) ? We will find out on 28th December.
Or maybe: :-) ? We will find out on 28th December.
Yesterday morning in the German forum we found some disturbing news. One of the persons had been called by her agency and informed that there were again changes in the adoption procedure in Ukraine: namely, at the time of registration all the documents in the dossier should be valid for at least 6 months more. Until now they were just to be valid, ie. not older than one year. Hard to describe what I felt when I read it. Our documents (except for two) expire in 3 months. And definitely we will not be able to renew everything until January, when they were going to accept new candidates again. So forget the quick registration, we need to run the administrative marathon first.
The first thing I did today was calling the SDA directly. There I found out that yes, it’s true, there is such a new rule in place. They are very sorry, but that’s it. And besides they will start to accept new dossiers as of 19th December (TOMORROW!!!)
Then Peter called our agency which already also had received the news. And then there were another calls, with our agency, with another family which is in our situation. Here are the results:
- Ukraine changed the rules for submitting documents at SDA. To avoid a document flood as of tomorrow they say that the documents are to be handed-in by facilitators – during a previously scheduled appointment. They will check the papers if they are ok immediately.
- Clou: one facilitator is allowed to submit only TWO dossiers every month. Our agency has currently two facilitators, which makes 4 dossiers a month. But hopefully as of January they will have 4 more, which then makes 12 dossiers a month in total. Of course only such dossiers which are valid for at least 6 months more.
- And now why we still have some little hope. In our agency there is one more couple who had waited as long as we had (actually even a month longer). Both our and their documents are now too old for the new rule. But one of the facilitators got an appointment for 28th December (!) and he will go to SDA and bring there the two dossiers – our and the one of the other family. We hope that there is some probability that the new law (the one about the 6 months validity) will be in place as of 1st January 2007. It might happen that we will still be registered this year…
And if not.. then we will submit the documents in February or March. There are 18 couples waiting now in our agency for registration at SDA, so there will be 8-10 dossiers registered in January and then hopefully the rest (us included) would be in February – if we manage to collect the documents by then.
Now we are waiting for the 28th December. We cannot do much more, unfortunately.
04 Dezember 2006
Yet another document needed
I have just read in the German adoption forum that another person who also adopts from Ukraine has just received a letter from ZfK saying that yet another document is required - so called 'residence proof'. Bingo, I expected that, as some time ago I read a script of an interview with Ms. Remen, the head director of the international adoptions department at SDA. She mentioned it coming and here it is.
Since it's already 4th December today, if we want to have our rental agreement notarized / apostilled / legalized, I assume I will take a day off to have bring it personally to the Ukrainian consulate in Frankfurt - to avoid waiting for 3 weeks. It will cost 50 EUR instead of 25 EUR, but we cannot wait if we want to send the ready document to ZfK before Christmas.
