November 17, 2007
Our travel meeting was Saturday, November 17th. It seemed like an eternity from the initial email that we may be matched (on Thursday, November 1st), to the actual match on Wednesday, November 7th to our travel meeting. We had originally thought we would be receiving translations of Gracie’s story and medical records a couple of days following the referral. Much to our chagrin, we were later informed that it’s normally 2-3 weeks before the translation would be in, but they would try to have them for our travel meeting. For those of you who are not familiar with the process, please let me explain the significance of this really important meeting! The purpose of this meeting is to get the families prepared to travel to China to adopt their children. 25 of the 28 families that will travel to China were at this meeting. Some families traveled in from as far as Arkansas and South Carolina. Many others came from Northern NJ and all over Pennsylvania. The families have an opportunity to meet the people who will share in an amazing life-changing event. We had known that there were going to be two separate travel groups. Ours, (consisting of 15 families, one of which will be bringing home twins) will travel to the JianXi Province, and most of our girls are coming from the Poyang Orphanage. The other group has 13 families, and they are traveling directly to GZ for their journey. The other part of this meeting is for the agency to collect our passports and a variety of other paperwork that needed to be completed prior to the meeting. The agency will then handle our travel assignments (TA) and obtaining our visas. The whole meeting ran close to 5 hours, and we had to wait until the very end to get Gracie’s translated medical information and the overview of her short life to date! The waiting was torture! We also had to provide several checks to cover expenses for our hotel in Hong Kong, roundtrip airfare from Newark, NJ to Hong Kong and our departure bus ride from the famous White Swan Hotel back to the Hong Kong Airport. (As an aside, the White Swan is a very well known hotel in China adoption circles. This is the hotel where all the new forever families stay as they wait to finalize their adoptions with the American Consulate.)Our expectation had been that we would leave the meeting with a fairly definitive idea of when we would be traveling to China. What we were told was that probably one of the groups would be traveling in December- it was thought around December 22nd. Then, there is a 7 day holiday in China where all government offices are closed from 1/1 through 1/7. This is a bit of a challenge, since everyone we need to meet with works for the Chinese Government! The second travel group will travel in January, possibly as early as the 5th, since a couple of days are dedicated to travel. We got to have dinner with several of the families from our group following the meeting. We feel very privileged to have several families that live locally!
