Haiti Family Program Update
December 16, 2014
Dear Families,
We hope this finds each of you well and enjoying this holiday season. We wanted to send out an update to all families in the program giving you some important information we have received from our representative in Haiti, Daniel.
Daniel along with other Agency representatives, were invited to attend a meeting at the US embassy where the Consul General of the Embassy as well as other diplomatic officials, Haitian and foreign authorities such as the IBESR Director Mme Villedroin, and M. Guillame along with Mme Sawadogo the acting Hague Convention representative for Haiti were present. Also in attendance were several judiciary officials for Haitian courts, including two Judge d’Enfants for the Port-au Prince jurisdiction, attorneys, and crèche directors.
During this meeting, discussion was made of the progress that IBESR was making in implementing the Hague Convention. Also discussed was ways that IBESR could be more efficient in the midst of changes to match available children to waiting families. IBESR indicated that they are currently understaffed but are working to move through the process in accordance with Hague. They indicated that non-Hague cases (those with I600A), would continue to be processed and they want to deal with these cases prior to processing their first Hague case.
There is however a slowdown in the matching process of children to families, as IBESR must confirm that the child is fully adoptable. To this end, they have instituted the following process before the child can be matched with a family.
1. First, if the child has living birthparents they must appear twice or even three times to IBESR.
2. The first meeting with the birthparents is for general information on adoption and what this means. They want the birthparents to fully understand the implications of placing their child for adoption.
3. IBESR then has an additional one or two meeting with the birthparents and at the final meeting, if the birthparents are still in agreement, they sign a pre-consentment document indicating they are in agreement to move forward with the procedure for their child to be placed for adoption.
4. The case will then be submitted to the Judge d’Enfants which officially registers the family’s consent for an adoption (in this case an international adoption). Once this document has been signed by parents and submitted to Judge, the parents have one month to reconsider their decision. Once this time frame has lapsed the child’s file returns to IBESR so they can then officially match the child to a waiting, approved family.
The process above has slowed down the matching process, as IBESR must wait until all of the above steps are completed before a child can be matched. Also, if the birthparents change their minds, then the child cannot be placed for adoption. As a result, the time frames from submission of dossier to being matched with a child is increasing.
As many families are requesting young children 0-3 years of age and many preferring females, the wait for a referral will be longer. However, we were pleased to hear from our representative that IBESR has indicated that they will be releasing the first of the New Year, a list of files of children that are ready for adoption, but for whom no family has been found yet. These children will be older children or children with special needs. We are hoping we can assist in finding these children families.
On another note, crèche’s in Haiti have indicated that they continue to submit files of children to IBESR for the matching process. Many of the crèche’s are not able to accept new children into their homes until some of the waiting children are placed. Also, some of the children that crèche’s are caring for are not adoptable, as families sometimes due to family issues and poverty, place the children at a crèche temporarily. This of course is putting a strain on all the crèche’s to care for the children as often a portion of the adoption fees paid by families go to support the work of the crèche and caring for the children.
Our representative in Haiti is very proactive in going to IBESR weekly to check on the status of pending files to see if any of our waiting families have received matches. When he has news on any of our cases, he will communicate that to your program coordinator. Our in country representative will continue to attend meetings with Embassy and IBESR officials as they occur and update us on the continuing progress that Haiti is making with Hague adoptions.
We hope this update has been helpful in understanding the current status in Haiti and their progress towards implementing The Hague. It is a slow process, which is understandably hard for waiting families but we are encouraged to hear they are working and being provided technical assistance by our Embassy.
Feel free to contact your program coordinator if you have questions about this update.
We hope you and your family have a wonderful Holiday season!
