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Hey everybody,Hubby and I are thinking about switching from El Salvador to Colombia. I'm very impressed with what I've read so far about Colombia's system, and how they genuinely seem to care about matching children with the right family for them, not out of convenience of just getting a child adopted.Since we're having issues with our agency, this change of country also would involve a change of agency. I've found La Vida International and am wondering if anyone with any experience with them could pm me please? (edited to conform to agency discussion guidelines) Any feedback would be appreciated!Thanks in advance :thanks:
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Hi,I don't have any info for you about LaVida, but I noticed you are thinking of switching from El Salvador to Colombia. We were thinking about El Salvador but aren't sure since it is not a popular choice for most. Would you mind PMing me the current agency you are using for El Salvador and what they have told you to expect? Thank you and good luck with your decision!B Brach
Hey Mom2gals,
I'll pm you more specific info about the agency stuff, but this is for the benefit of others who are looking for info on El Salvador. I didn't see anything about discussing actual governments in the TOS so here goes. Some agencies have stopped accepting applications to their E. S. programs due to the length of time it's been taking for adoptions to go through. I've been told that the length of time has to do with lack of manpower in the long process of 1. declaring a child adoptable/abandoned/orphaned (that's ISNA's responsibility) 2. processing the dossier and approving a potential adoptive family (that's OPA's responsibility). Now, throw into the mix the fact that the presence of 2 top government officials is required at regular meetings to approve referrals, etc, and they haven't been able to synchronize schedules for a few months, so those meetings haven't occurred so nobody's getting anywhere.
So, keep in mind we decided to leave our agency. I looked into using a lawyer from El Salvador, for which you need a Hague accredited agency to take responsibility for the adoption. Here's the rub, even though there are clear rules written in the Hague convention regarding how to do this, I couldn't find any agency who was willing to be what's called the supervisory agency (to replace the one we were firing). Because there are so few agencies that had existing programs in El Salvador, (I think there were about 5 in the US listed on OPA's website), they didn't want to risk something possibly going wrong due to their unfamiliarity with the country because they were afraid of losing their accreditations. No accreditation=NO international adoptions period.
So, after all this, we decided that it was just too hard to stick with E.S., and are switching to a more stable country with a long established adoption program.
I'll pm you later re: our agency later. I hope this helps some!