Wednesday, July 8, 2009

About That Dossier....

I once collected a dossier for an adoption, including all the necessary immigration paperwork, in less than two months. If anyone reading this has ever completed a dossier, I know that you must be at least nearly as impressed with me as I was. Home study, immigration, health paperwork, financial paperwork.... it was all there, and all shipped to Ukraine, where our approval was issued much sooner than we expected.

You can imagine my surprise, or rather my despair, when I received a phone call from our contact in Ukraine who had to tell me the terrible news. A social worker in the adoption center had 'rechecked' our work and found 5 terribly small 'errors', taken us off the listed of approved adoptive parents and then promptly mailed our dossier back to the US!

I wasn't sure what was worse... being 'unapproved' or having our dossier, so full of sensitive information, being sent back to the US via snail mail. That was over 3 years ago, and it still hasn't arrived home, but our daughter did, and that was all that mattered.

Lesson learned? I was able to rebuild the dossier within a week and had it back to my translator within two weeks. That was because I had certified copies or multiple copies of the originals of every document I collected.

It's worth the extra time and money to get multiple copies of every document, and to make certified copies of any originals that don't come in duplicate.

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