Cost And Duration Of Adoption From Eastern Europe

We have experience of international adoption from Ukraine. We adopted twice from this country and liked it a lot despite its bureaucracy. Cost and duration of adoption process were two big things for us when we embarked on international adoption and were choosing a suitable country of Eastern Europe for adoption. As to duration of adoption process in Ukraine: It took us 25 days to finalize adoption in 2009 and 42 days in 2011. One trip is required to adopt from Ukraine which makes this country pretty attractive Based on our experience and experience of other families who adopted from Ukraine I can conclude that duration of adoption process in Ukraine depends on a region of adoption, adoption criteria, circumstances of an adoption case and an adoption facilitator. But on the average it takes from 30 to 45 days to adopt from Ukraine now as our facilitators says. Those families who have a great deal of flexibility in adoption criteria stand better chance to have a short process in Ukraine. If your criteria are not that flexible, the process might be a little longer for you. As to Cost of Ukraine adoption: Our expenses in Ukraine totaled 16,000$ in 2011. They covered adoption of two kids and all the related expenses. As we learned procedural expenses pretty heavily hinge on a region of adoption and agency/adoption facilitator you choose. We chose to adopt independently by hiring an adoption facilitator directly. That was not an easy choice but we are happy that we made it. Thanks to our facilitator we saved lots of money on lodging and transportation in the country: instead of paying for an apartment on a daily basis (which was 300 grivnas per day (about 35$), he found an apartment that we rented on a monthly basis, paying 250$ per month. Also our facilitator arranged for a driver with a very reasonable fees. Considering that we had to shuttle between two small towns, it saved us some money too. Another big thing on which we saved thanks to our facilitator was preparing documents for adoption from Ukraine. Agencies usually charge for this service a fortune. Our facilitators fee included this service. So he helped us to compose our adoption dossier correctly, advising us on each step of a dossier preparation process and checking each document of a dossier before we sent it to Ukraine. As I wrote before, it was not easy to find a competent, experienced and reliable facilitator for a reasonable fee. We reviewed many contracts before we found our facilitator. And I have noticed that many contracts that we got especially those ones that charged suspiciously small fees for adoption services were pretty equivocal and overwhelming majority of them required advance payments without due provision for refund. We were quite confident and comfortable with our facilitator as his contract was very clear and very detailed. It provided for all the possible payments and unambiguously said what was included in the fee and what was not. Another advantage of his contract is that families pay only for a job that has been done. And no advance payment except for dossier preparation payment is required. That is why my advice is to pay a special attention to contracts when choosing an adoption agency or adoption facilitator. If there are any advance payments, there should be a good refund policy. I hope they will be helpful for anyone going to adopt internationally. If anybody needs an additional info on Ukraine adoption/our adoption experience, please, PM me. Cathy.