Looking to Adopt in Colombia (ICBF) from Canada

Hello there. We also have recently started our adoption journey with Appel Ontario. Nice to know that we have company on this trip.

Hi There, My husband and I contacted Appel last week. We found a worker to start the homestudy. I'm glad to hear that others are involved in the Colombian adoption process and have contacted this agency.

So great to hear there are a few of us working with Appel-Ontario. I hope we can learning from each other and offer support and friendship. Just think... in a few years maybe we can have our kids play together! We are just about finished our first Spanish class and plan to keep with it next term. We have had our first homestudy appointment and the first half of our PRIDE class is this weekend. Have any of you found any really helpful books I should get reading? Have any of you started to get your house ready for the home visit? Not sure where to start with that. Take care and chat often!

Has anyone been in touch with Appel-Ontario recently?

Hi there. Yes we have been in contact with Appel-Ontario. Are you having issues?

No, I had an email with some questions that had gone unresponded to.

Hey everyone. Yes we have also been in contact wit Appel in Ontario. Unfortch because we live in Alberta there is only so much they can do for us. Our home study and psych rivals are done and now we are sending them to the Alberta gov for approval. You can check out our blog also at duxburyadoption.com

Interesting to hear because we have not had issues with email responses from Appel-Ontario. Try reaching out to them again and see how it goes. Who do you normally speak with? We deal with a person by the name of Tim. Good luck.

Hi guys. We are just finishing our psych assessments but we were wondering how much others have been quoted for this. I find that this is very expensive to have done.

Hi Everyone, Any new? Has anyone made any progress? How are the homestudies going?

Hi there. My wife and I have been waiting for MYCS's (Ministry) response to our homestudy submission for International adoption. We completed the PRIDE and are now getting ready to renew our documentation such as RCMP checks and Medicals. Hope to hear from the ministry soon, its been a month already.

I happened to check the Appel webiste and it seems that their licence is on-hold until the ICBF reviews the application. Are we all on-hold or have any of the potential adoptive parents found a way around this?

Have you guys been in touch with Appel? We got an email from Tim that suggests there's some political activities happening with the office. It makes me nervous--- he says that we will be helped by Appel (in Quebec) but the tone of the email isn't particularly positive sounding. Thoughts? We're just wrapping up our homestudy. Waiting on the last of the fingerprint results and hopefully get stage one of the documentation finished.

Hello everyone. We have been in touch with Appel in Ontario. We are in Alberta and looking to adopt in Colombia. We have finished our home study and just received the approved version in the mail last week...all done and Alberta approved. Now we have to get everything notarized and translated. Appel in Ont said that they send everything to Colombia to get translated rather then getting it translated locally. I can see the extra cost that this would be but might be worth to know that it is being done right. However I am thinking of getting one of my spanish speaking friends to call the ICBF and find out the rules on this. Unless someone here already knows. Appel assured me that they could help me with the process. The help that they would be giving me though is just dossier checking and sending for translation and then when we actually arrive in colombia they have someone there to help you with the rest of the process while you are there. So they are not really acting as our coordinator or liaison. Because Colombia is a Hague country you have to have a nominated coordinator helping you in your home country. Unfortch there isn't one in alberta that works with colombia at all...so we are using Appel to appease the Alberta Govnt and show that we are not doing this privately on our own. We have also been using CAS here in alberta to get to the point that we are at now. We are mostly decided that we are going to go with a Casa Privata instead of the ICBF...but not 100% sure about that or how to actually nominate that on the paper work. Anyway hope that helps some of this conversation for some of you. The fact that there are problems with Appel has not come up in any of my conversations with the guys there...but that could have changed in the last month or so. It looks increasingly harder and harder to actually get success adopting internationally. The US numbers have gone from 20K a year to 8k a year and there are no stats for canada past 2010...in 2010 62 kids were adopted into canada from colombia...would love to hear from one of them on how they did it.

Thanks everyone on this blog. The exchange of information is very helpful. I was under the impression that adoptive parents could only select a country to adopt from if... 1. the province where the applicant resides has an agency appoved by the province, specifically for that country -----and---- 2. that the agency is recognized and approved by the child's home country. We've been taking our time with the homestudy waiting for Appel to get final approval from Colombia. After reading the response and blog posted by the couple from Alberta it doesn't seem like we need Appel to be fully licenced. You guys are really forging ahead. Let's keep and touch.