Well we have started our journey to China today! It is basically a “hurry up and wait” type of situation. We were up at 4am this morning, left Grand Island, flew to Dallas, quickly boarded for Chicago and now are hanging out at Chicago O’Hara Airport for 9 hours. It can quickly squash the excitement buzz of “going to China.”
So, while we are figuring out ways to spend the time, I thought I would write a post for our blog. I realized that while we have an understanding (or at least pretend to have an understanding ) of what is going to happen in China, many of you are uncertain how it works. There are several families that are at the same stage we are and received the coveted travel approval when we did. We are grouped together in a travel group. Our travel group is #1750. The day we received our itinerary, all of us families had a conference call with our adoption agency CCAI, which is based out of Colorado. During that call we were told there were 15 families in our travel group, with more possibly being added the next day. So, we have at least 15 families that are grouped together for this trip.
We are required to figure out our own travel arrangements to get to China and back home. You probably saw the post about how much “fun” that was. CCAI, makes all of the travel arrangements for us within China, including booking flights, hotels, and bus transportation to our various appointments. The majority of the families will be flying into Beijing. We are met at the airport by a CCAI representative, who will lead us during our time in Beijing. They are available to us 24/7 if needed. We are grateful they will be there when we arrive at 11:30 pm and make sure we get to our hotel & checked in ok. The first few days are spent touring Beijing and getting adjusted to the time difference. For us in Nebraska, China is 13 hours ahead of our current time. I think Bethany has been already working on this adjustment, because when we are winding down for the night, she is up and ready to go…actually I think it is just a teenage thing.
After a few days, the families fly off to different provinces, depending on where their children are. There are some families going to the Henan Province that we are, so we will have others from our travel group with us. Provinces are basically states for us. We will not fly to the actual city where Anastyn is, but rather the capital of that province/state. For us, Zhengzhou, (pronounced Zen Joe) is that capital. When we arrive, we will have another CCAI representative to assist us. The orphanage staff actually brings the children to the capital, either via car or by bus. We will then be united with our little ones. I believe this is about a 2 hour drive from Luoyang where Anna is living.
We will spend about 5 days in Zhengzhou and Anna will be with us that entire time. After all the paperwork is completed in the capital cities, all of the families fly to Guangzhou where we meet with the U.S. Consulate. ALL adopting families HAVE to go to Guangzhou for this process. We are there for a few days and then the families are separate, going back to their homes. Once again, we will have a CCAI representative with us. While we have these leaders helping us, they are not with us the entire time, taking us shopping etc, so when we go out on our “free days” we will be on our own, or with other families. This is surely to be challenging, although many, many families before us have successfully accomplished this, so I know we will as well!
One other point that has come up that I wanted to clarify. As you know, we adopted Blayten domestically (within the U.S). It is an open adoption, where Blayten’s birth mom, Alyssa, chose us to parent Blayten and we remain in contact with her. In China, things are very different, and due to the one child rule, which means the Chinese government only allows 1 child per family, poverty, and other issues, many parents have to make the difficult decision to abandon their children. They don’t do this because they don’t love & care for their children, they do it because they are choosing a better life than they can provide for their baby. Although this is common practice, it is very much against the law to abandon a child, so this is often done, with few witnesses. Anastyn was found by a river. We hope to go to this area, although the river is quite large, so we will not know the exact place she was found There was no identifying information, so the doctors had to guess what her age and birthdate was. They estimated her to be 2 months old, and 2 month premature. She was given the birthday of July 20, 2009. We do NOT know, nor we ever know who Anastyn’s birth mom is.
What that about summarizes what is happening in China. Hope that helps clarify a few things!
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