Bumps in the road

Well, the first group of 4 families have been in Zambia now for about 1 1/2 weeks. It has not gone as smoothly or as quickly as thought, but now at least some of the families have their children. The hope of this agency was for each family to identify their babies within the first few days and be fostering them immediately after - so they are about a week behind. These are the "pioneers" of this program so I guess this was to be expected. Our agency is learning and making adjustments. There will be pre-selection of children for the families before they travel from now on. The problem is that there are many orphaned babies and children, but few with any paperwork proving that they are orphaned. Even though these families may spend an extra week or two in Zambia, their total process with this Zambian adoption will be 2 -3 months because they all already had their homestudies completed for other countries. That is amazingly fast in the adoption world.