MARCH CHINA PROGRAM UPDATE

Dear China Families,

There have been a number of important developments with the China
program this month that I want to report to everyone. First I wanted to
let you know the good news, that China actually made substantial
progress in matching healthy children this month. CCAA has now matched
dossiers that were logged through April 11th, 2006. (This is 4 business
days worth of dossiers, which is considerable progress.) April 19th,
2006 dossier group, you are moving ever closer to match. (Hang in
there!) CCAA did not make any further progress with reviewing dossiers
this month. They have still reviewed dossiers submitted through April
30th, 2008.

The second thing I needed to let everyone know about is CCAA has just
implemented a new policy. They are no longer sending designated
referrals to individual adoption agencies effective immediately. They
rescinded all unmatched designated referrals sent to individual adoption
agencies last week. Li checked with CCAA and this unfortunately means
that Welcome House will not receive the next group of designated
referrals that we were supposed to get at the end of March. The reason
CCAA gave for doing away with the designated referrals for individual
agencies, is that hard to place children were not being efficiently
matched that way. They have a better chance of finding loving homes for
waiting children, particularly harder to place ones, if they release
information to all agencies simultaneously.

It remains to be seen how this new policy will impact Welcome House's
ability to successfully match waiting children with families. Children
with mild special needs will now be open to all agencies, so Becki may
well be able to match more families with waiting children, but we will
also face increased competition from other US agencies.

It appears that CCAA is going to make further changes to the on-line
system, so keep watching the yahoo group for updates. I will continue to
update

Our next three families are getting ready to travel to China in March
and early April. All three families were successfully matched with
children from the shared list. So successful matches do occur this way.

Finally, if there are any China families in process with an I-600 A
approval, if you and your spouse are both under 44 years of age.... I
wanted to let you know that I just received a referral for a very sweet
little boy from Korea last week, who is a waiting child. He was born on
8/31/2009, and was diagnosed with transient tachypnea of newborn, but he
is doing extremely well at this point, and is currently developmentally
on target and all follow up testing, MRI and EEG were normal. There is
comprehensive medical information available. I have uploaded his photo
in the Photo section. Please contact me if you are interested. We can
switch an I-600 A approval from Korea to China, as long as you meet
Korea's eligibilty requirements. I am going to post to the Welcome House
waiting child group as well, but I want to give China families who have
been waiting for a long time, every opportunity to get successfully
matched. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about
this sweet little boy.

Amy