“Make sure you pick the right agency!” That’s what everyone kept telling us. But how do you choose from the many adoption agencies out there?
We ended up relying on a reference from a relative of ours who had used Adoption Ark and had nothing but great things to say about them. For those of you who don’t have such a personal reference, I wanted to write this letter confirming that we had a wonderful experience with Adoption Ark and would recommend them to others.
We started our process in early January of 2007, and by mid August of the same year, we were bringing home Sasha, our wonderful new daughter from Kazakhstan. Sasha is five years old, and she’s a loving, healthy, and very inquisitive little girl. I don’t know what it means, but it certainly seemed more than coincidental that we arrived back at our home with Sasha exactly on her 5th birthday.
When we began the process, we didn’t know much about adoption, particularly international adoption, but we knew it was important to pick the right agency. We certainly think we did. Adoption Ark was very upfront about the risks involved in the process and in dealing with foreign countries, their people were honest and didn’t make promises they couldn’t keep, and both the U.S. and in country people were very experienced and enjoyable.
We meet with Adoption Ark initially to discuss our goals and fears. After listening to us and asking questions, they steered us to Kazakhstan for our adoption. One of our goals was to travel during the summer as we would be taking our 8 year old son with us, and we wanted to go during his summer break. Alla, and the other Adoption Ark people had the experience to help us quickly get through the U.S. process and to quickly get our dossier and LOI processed in Kazakhstan. There were a couple of emotionally critical times when Alla was scheduled to be out of town, and Elina stepped right in and kept the process moving forward. In fact, they got us our LOI before our son’s summer break even started! It could have been luck, but luck happens to people who are prepared and experienced.
We know of people who traveled to Kazakhstan only to find out their preferred child wasn’t even available, and we met a couple who were being sent home from Kazakhstan because the judge determined their paper work was not in order. We also know several other people who had to wait 3-4 times longer than we did to receive their LOI from the Kazakhstan government. We may be the luckiest people in the world, but I think we just picked the right agency.
Thank you Adoption Ark!
Scott, Suzanne, Bryan and Sasha Graeser